§ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




JOSEPH M9 D onou^ 
RARE BOONS 

ALBANY -NY I 



HISTORICAL STUDIES. 



BY 



V 

EUGENE LAWRENCE. 




NEW YORK: 

HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, 

FRANKLIN SQUARE. 

1876. 



y v 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by 

Harper & Brothers, 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



PREFACE. 



The following historical papers have appeared at intervals 
in Harper's New Monthly Magazine. I trust, notwithstand- 
ing their imperfections, that they may furnish a useful outline 
of the slow advance of knowledge and the decay of ecclesias- 
tical tyranny. The chief aim of the Roman Church has been 
the destruction of the intellect. The chief result of the over- 
throw of persecution has been the rapid growth of the popu- 
lar mind. It is well, therefore, to review these remarkable 
mental struggles by the light of republican progress. Our 
benefactors in the past have been, not kings, popes, or princes, 
but those memorable men who have lived and died for religion 
and knowledge. To them it has at last become customary 
to trace the most valuable results of modern progress. Edu- 
cation, intelligence, virtue, religion, have nourished in spite of 
the intolerance of popes and kings; and the New World, in 
the centennial year of freedom, turns gratefully to the heroes 
who died, that men might be free. 



CONTENTS. 



The Bishops of Rome Page 9 

Hebrew missionaries, 11 ; age of martyrdom, 13 ; in the Catacombs, 
15 ; a defaulting bisbop, 17 ; an Arian Pope, 19 ; a haughty priest- 
hood, 21 ; Pope Silverius, 23 ; Gregory's visions, 25 ; Gregory's mental 
influence, 27 ; the worship of relics, 29 ; the Popes defend image- wor- 
ship, 31 ; Hildebrand, 33 ; Gregory VII., 35 ; the emperor at Canossa, 
37; Gregory delivered by the Normans, 39 ; death of Gregory VII., 41 ; 
Innocent III. and Philip Augustus, 43 ; Philip subdued, 45 ; the Albi- 
genses, 47; death of the troubadours, 49; mendicant orders, 51 ; the 
Borgias, 53 ; the modern Popes, 55. 

Leo and Luther. 56 

A conclave, 57 ; the papal electors, 59 ; Giovanni de' Medici, 61 ; Lu- 
ther's childhood, 63 ; Luther a monk, 65 ; Leo in misfortune, 67 ; Leo 
X. as Pope, 69 ; the Golden Age of Leo, 71 ; the Pope in danger, 73 ; 
the cardinal would poison Leo, 75 ; Leo's extravagance, 77 ; indul- 
gences, 79 ; an El Dorado, 81 ; Luther's danger, 83 ; Germany unquiet, 
85; intellectual tourneys, 87; Luther and Eck, 89; Luther summoned 
to Worms, 91 ; Luther's hymn, 93 ; the Diet of Worms, 95 ; Luther con- 



LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS 99 

Loyola's wounds, 101 ; Loyola a beggar, 103 ; the strength of Jesuit- 
ism, 105; Luther and Loyola, 107; Loyola's disciples, 109; Paul III., 
Ill ; the Roman Inquisition, 113 ; the papal massacres, 115 ; the 
"Spiritual Exercises," 117; the Council of Trent, 119; the Jesuits at 
Trent, 121 ; great wealth of the Jesuits, 123 ; Xavier in the East, 125 ; 
Jesuit literature, 127 ; Jesuit assassins, 129 ; William of Orange, 131 ; 
Jesuit executions, 133 ; Father Garnet, 135 ; fall of Jesuitism, 137; the 
Jesuits driven from Spain, 139; the order dissolved, 141; Loyola's 
death, 143. 



6 CONTENTS. 

Ecumenical Councils Page 144 

The assembling at Nice, 145; the town -hall at Nice, 147; Constan- 
tine's crime, 149 ; various heresies, 151 ; union of the Church, 153 ; the 
Second Council, 155; Gregory Nazianzen, 157; a council vituperated, 
159 ; Pope Damasus, 161 ; Cyril and Hypatia, 163 ; the fallen Church, 
165 ; Dioscorus and his robbers, 167 ; Pope Honorius the Heretic, 169 ; 
the monastic rule, 171 ; monkish rule, 173 ; Council of Constance, 175 ; 
deposition of a Pope, 177; John Huss, 179; Huss at Constance, 181; 
execution of Huss, 183; reformation, 185; Council of Trent, 187; the 
Jesuits at Trent, 189 ; Lainez at Trent, 191 ; the Council closes, 193 ; 
the decrees of Trent, 195 ; the First Council, 197. 

The Vaudois 198 

San Martino, 199 ; the barbes, 201 ; the Popes and the Vaudois, 203 ; 
the Alpine Church, 205 ; the Jesuits in the valleys, 207; papal perse- 
cutors, 209; the Vaudois doomed, 211; the Battle of Pra del Tor, 
213; Vaudois patience, 215; the "Noble Lesson," 217; omens of dan- 
ger, 219 ; the flight of the Vaudois, 221 ; Milton would save the Vau- 
dois, 223 ; the cave of Castelluzo, 225 ; mass celebrated in the valleys, 
227; Janavel, 229; "The Glorious Return," 231; the Balsille, 233; 
winter on the Balsille, 235 ; the Vaudois fly, 237 ; a Glorious Return, 
239 ; new persecutions, 241 ; Turin does honor to the Vaudois, 243 ; 
the moderator triumphs over the Pope, 245. 

The Huguenots 247 

Eminent Huguenots, 249 ; Palissy the Potter, 251 ; reformers outlaw- 
ed, 253 ; the Bible, 255 ; Bibles burned, 257 ; the printers and the 
Popes, 259 ; Philippa de Lunz, 261 ; Catherine de' Medici, 263 ; Cathe- 
rine's superstition, 265; Jeanne d'Albret, 267 ; the Huguenots rise, 269; 
death of Jeanne d'Albret, 271 ; Marguerite's wedding, 273 ; Charles IX. 
irresolute, 275; the Louvre, 277; the massacre commemorated, 279; 
the Edict of Nantes, 281 ; inhuman orators, 283 ; priests persecute in- 
dustry, 285; generous Geneva, 287; the Seigneur Bostaquet, 289; the 
galley-slaves, 291 ; the " Church in the Desert," 293 ; Jean Calas, 295 ; 
the Revolution, 297 ; Pius IX. and the Huguenots, 299. 

The Church of Jerusalem 300 

Ancient capitals, 301 ; the Holy City, 303 ; scenes around Jerusalem, 
305 ; the Castle of Antonia, 307 ; the home of Mary, 309 ; St. Peter, 
311 ; St. John, 313 ; Jewish festivals, 315 ; Roman paganism, 317 ; 
apostolic charities, 319; the martyrs, 321; dispersion of the Church, 
323 ; Paul at Damascus, 325 ; Paul the Persecutor, 327 ; death of 
James, 329 ; the First Council, 331 ; Ephesus, 333 ; Athens, 335 ; Paul 
at Jerusalem, 337; Csesarea, 339 ; Paul in the storm, 341 ; was St. Peter 



CONTENTS. 7 

at Rome ? 343 ; martyrdom of James the Just, 345 ; Galilee ravaged, 
347; the Last Passover, 349; the Holy of Holies, 351; Titus the De- 
stroyer, 353; Simeon rules the Church, 355; the Pastor of Hermas, 357. 

Dominic and the Inquisition Page 358 

The Inquisition, 359 ; heresy in France, 361 ; the Albigenses, 363 ; Albi 
desolated, 365; the Spanish Inquisition, 367; the Jews persecuted, 
369 ; Torquemada, 371 ; fate of the Spanish Jews, 373 ; the Moors in 
Spain, 375; the Holy Houses, 377; Savonarola, 379; death of Savo- 
narola, 381; an auto-da-fe, 383 ; the procession of Inquisitors, 385 ; Italy 
Protestant, 387; Italy subdued, 389 ; Galileo, 391; Galileo's crime, 393 ; 
the first aeronaut, 395 ; Italy and Spain decay, 397; Eugland under an 
Inquisition, 399 ; condition of Spain, 401 ; the Roman Inquisitors, 403 ; 
Pius IX. revives the Inquisition, 405; sorrows and deliverance of 
Rome, 407. 

The Conquest of Ireland 409 

Irish scenery, 411 ; Patrick in Ireland, 413 ; Irish scholars, 415 ; the 
Irish Church, 417; the Pope sells Ireland to its enemies, 419; Dermot 
in England, 421; Irish valor, 423; Roderic O'Connor, 425; Dublin 
taken, 427; the Normans in Dublin, 429; the Irish unite, 431; Henry 
II., 433; Ireland subjected to Rome, 435; Henry II. in Ireland, 437; 
the Pope's bull, 439 ; the death of Roderic, 441 ; Roman priests kill 
the Irish, 443 ; the Irish victorious, 445 ; the Jesuits in Ireland, 447 ; 
massacre of Ulster, 449 ; the Irish emigrants, 451 ; the University of 
Armagh, 453. 

The Greek Church 455 

The Seven Churches, 457; Constantinople, 459; the dome of St. 
Sophia, 461; St. Sophia, 463; the Oriental shrine, 465; the Arabs and 
the Greek Church, 467 ; the Popes and the Eastern Church, 469 ; 
Photius and his age, 471 ; decay of the patriarchates, 473 ; Russian 
ascetics, 475 ; Rurik, 477; Vladimir converted, 479 ; Ivan the Terrible, 
481 ; the Kremlin, 483; Boris Godunoff, 485; the false Demetrius, 487; 
Marina, 489; the Romanoffs, 491; Nikon, 493; Nikon's fall, 495; Peter 
the Great, 497; Solovetsky, 499. 



INDEX 501 



HISTORICAL STUDIES. 



TEE BISHOPS OF JROME.Q) 

Lsr her faded magnificence, Rome still possesses the most 
imposing of earthly empires. She rules over nearly two hun- 
dred millions of the human race. Her well-ordered army of 
priests, both, regular and secular, arrayed almost with the pre- 
cision of a Roman legion, and governed by a single will, car- 
ry the standard of St. Peter to the farthest bounds of civil- 
ization, and cover the whole earth with a chain of influences 
radiating from the central city. The Pope is still powerful 
in Europe and America, Africa and the East. He disturbs 
the policy of England, and sometimes governs that of France ; 
his influence is felt in the revolutions of Mexico and the elec- 
tions of New York.( 2 ) Hemmed in by the Greek Church on 
the eastward, engaged in a constant struggle with the Protest- 
antism of the North, and trembling for his ancestral domin- 
ions in the heart of Italy itself, the Supreme Pontiff still gal- 
lantly summons around him his countless priestly legions, 
and thunders from the Vatican the sentiments of the Middle 
Ages. 

As if to maintain before the eyes of mankind a semblance 
of supernatural splendor, the Popes have invented and per- 
fected at Pome a ritual more magnificent than was ever 



(*) Gieseler, Ecclesiastical History; Milman, Latin Christianity. 

( 2 ) Since this was written (1869) the papal power has fallen. But the 
Pope is still the most active and dangerous of politicians in every civil- 
ized land. 



10 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

known before. In the Basilica of St. Peter, the largest and 
most costly building ever erected by man, the annual pomp 
of the Romish ceremonies exceeds the powers of description. 
The gorgeous robes, the plaintive music, the assembled throng 
of princes, cardinals, and priests, the various rites designed 
to paint in living colors the touching memorials of the Sav- 
iour's life and death, delight or impress the inquisitive and 
the devout. And when at length the Holy Father, parent of 
all the faithful, appears upon the balcony of St. Peter's and 
bestows his blessing upon mankind, few turn away unaffected 
by the splendid spectacle, untouched by the peculiar fascina- 
tion of the magnificent Church of Pome. 

Very different, however, in character and appearance was 
that early church which the Popes claim to represent. The 
Jewish Christians entered pagan Pome probably about the 
middle of the first century. That city was then the capital 
of the Poman Empire and of the world. Its population was 
more than a million ; its temples, baths, and public buildings 
were still complete in their magnificence ; its streets were fill- 
ed with a splendid throng of senators, priests, and nobles ; its 
palaces were scenes of unexampled luxury ; and literature and 
the fine arts still flourished, although with diminished lustre. 
But the moral condition of Pome during the reigns of Claudi- 
us and Nero shocked even the unrefined consciences of Juve- 
nal and Persius. A cold, dull materialism pervaded all ranks 
of the people; the intellect was enchained by spells more 
gross and foul than the enchantments of Comus ; crime kept 
pace with luxury, and the ■ palaces of emperors and senators 
were stained with horrible deeds that terrified even the hard- 
ened sentiment of Pome.( 3 ) At length Nero became a ra- 
ging madman. He murdered his mother, his friends, and 
his kinsmen. Seneca and Lucan, the literary glories of the 
age, died at his command. To forget his fearful deeds, Nero 
plunged into wild excesses. He roamed like a bacchanal 
through the streets of the city ; he sung upon the stage 

( 3 ) Tacitus, Juvenal, and Persius indicate the condition of Kome. Meri- 
vale and Gibbon may be consulted. 



HEBREW MISSIONARIES. 11 

amidst the applauding throng of mimics and actors, and his 
horrible revelry was mingled with a cruelty that almost sur- 
passes belief. 

The people of Rome were little less corrupt than their em- 
peror. Honor, integrity, and moral purity were mocked at 
and contemned by the degraded descendants of Cicero and 
Cato, and the keen satire of Juvenal has thrown a shameful 
immortality upon the vicious and criminal of his contempora- 
ries. Gain was the only aim of the Romans. The husband 
sold his honor, the parent his child, friend betrayed friend, 
wives denounced their husbands, to win the means of a lux- 
urious subsistence. The amusements of the people, too, were 
well fitted to instruct them in degradation and crime. 
Thousands of wretched gladiators died in the arena to sat- 
isfy the Roman thirst for blood; gross and frivolous panto- 
mimes had supplanted on the stage the tragedies of Accius 
and the comedies of Terence; the witty but indecorous epi- 
grams of Martial were beginning to excite the interest of the 
cultivated ; and even the philosophic Seneca, plunged in the 
luxury of his palaces and villas, wrote in vain his defense of 
the matricide of Nero. 

It was into such a city that the early missionaries from Je- 
rusalem made their way, about the middle of the first century, 
bearing to unhappy Rome the earliest tidings of the gospel 
of peace. Amidst the splendid throng of consulars, knights, 
and nobles, they wandered obscure and unknown strangers. 
The first bishop of Rome, clothed in coarse and foreign garb, 
and mingling with the lowest classes of the people, was 
scarcely noticed by the frivolous courtiers of Nero, or that 
literary opposition which was inspired by the vigorous hon- 
esty of the satirists and poets. Yet Christianity seems to have 
made swift though silent progress. Within thirty years from 
the death of its author a church had already been gathered at 
Rome, and the simple worship of the early Christians was cel- 
ebrated under the shadow of the Capitol. Their meetings 
were held in rooms and private houses in obscure portions of 
the city; the exhortations of the apostles were heard with 
eager interest by the lower orders of the Romans ; a new 



12 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

hope dawned upon the oppressed and the obscure, and it is 
said that a large number of the earlier converts were slaves. 
Little is known of the condition of the Church at this period ; 
yet we may properly infer that its congregations were numer- 
ous, and that the voice of praise and prayer was heard issuing 
from many an humble dwelling of the crowded and dissolute 
city. Amidst the shouts and groans of the blood-stained 
arena, and the wild revels of the streets and the palaces, the 
Jewish teachers inculcated to eager assemblies lessons of gen- 
tleness and love. 

Suddenly, however, a terrible light is thrown upon the con- 
dition of the early Church of Kome. Nero began his famous 
persecution, and the severe pen of the historian Tacitus bears 
witness to the wide and rapid growth of the obscure faith. 
" The founder of the sect, Christ," says the pagan writer, "was 
executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator, Pontius 
Pilate. The pernicious superstition, repressed for a time, burst 
forth again ; not only through Judea, the birthplace of the 
evil, but at Rome also, where every thing atrocious and base 
centres and is in repute." Rome had lately been desolated 
by a great fire, which Nero was believed to have ordered to 
be kindled in one of his moments of insane merriment ; and, 
to remove suspicion from himself, the emperor charged the 
Christians with an attempt to burn the city. Those first ar- 
rested, says Tacitus, confessed their guilt ; vast numbers were 
put to death ; some were clad in the skins of wild beasts and 
were torn to pieces by dogs ; others were affixed to crosses, 
and, being covered with some inflammable material, were burn- 
ed at night, in the place of torches, to dispel the darkness. 
Nero lent his gardens for the hideous spectacle, the populace 
of Rome crowded to the novel entertainment, and the em- 
peror, driving his own chariot, rode amidst the throng, clad 
in the garb of a charioteer. In the last year of the reign of 
this monster, St. Peter and St. Paul, a doubtful tradition re- 
lates, suffered martyrdom at Rome, and were buried in the 
spots now marked by the two noble Basilicas that bear their 
names. 

From this period (67) the new and powerful sect became a 



AGE OF MARTYRDOM. 13 

constant object of imperial persecution. The Christians were 
denounced as the common enemies of mankind. The grossest 
crimes, the foulest superstitions, were charged against them. 
The learned Eomans looked upon them with contempt as a 
vulgar throng of deluded enthusiasts. Pliny speaks of them 
with gentle scorn ; the wise Trajan and the philosophic Aure- 
lius united in persecuting them ; and Decius and Diocletian 
sought to extirpate every vestige of the hated creed. Six 
great persecutions are noticed by the historians, from that of 
Nero to that of Maximin and Diocletian, during which the 
whole civilized world everywhere witnessed the constancy and 
resignation of the Christian martyrs. 

It was the age of martyrdom. An infinite number of nov- 
el tortures were devised by the infuriated pagans to rack the 
bodies of their unresisting victims. Some were affixed to 
crosses and left to starve ; some were suspended by the feet, 
and hung with their heads downward until they died ; some 
were crushed beneath heavy weights ; some beaten to death 
with iron rods ; some were cast into caldrons of blazing oil ; 
some were thrown, bound, into dungeons to be eaten by mice ; 
some were pierced with sharp knives ; and thousands died in 
the arena, contending with wild beasts, to amuse the populace 
of Rome.Q The mildest punishment awarded to the Chris- 
tians was to labor in the sand-pits, or to dig in the distant 
mines of Sardinia and Spain. Men, women, and children, the 
noble convert or the faithful slave, suffered a common doom, 
and were exposed to tortures scarcely equaled by the poetic 
horrors of Dante's terrible Inferno. Yet the honors paid to 
these early martyrs in a later age were almost as extravagant 
as their sufferings had been severe. The city which had been 
consecrated by their tortures deemed itself hallowed by their 
doom. The sepulchre of eighteen martyrs, sung Prudentius, 
has made holy the fair city of Saragossa. Splendid churches 

( a ) Prudentius, Migne, lx., p. 450-'54, sings the sufferings of the martyrs. 
See Peristeph., hymn x., p. 1069. Conspirat uuo fcederatus spiritu. 
Grex Christianus, agmen imperterritum 
Matrum, virorum, parvulorum, virginum ; 
Fixa et statuta est omnibus sententia, etc. 



14 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

were built over the graves of obscure victims ; the bones of 
the martyrs were looked upon as the most precious relics; 
they were enchased in gold and covered with jewels; they 
wrought miracles, healed the sick, and brought prosperity and 
good fortune ; and the humblest Christian who had been rack- 
ed with sharp knives or hung with his head downward, in the 
days of pagan persecution, was now deified, worshiped, and al- 
most adored. 

It was during the reign of the early persecution that the 
bishops and the Church of Rome sought, and perhaps found, 
a refuge in that singular hiding-place — the Catacombs. Q Be- 
neath the Campagna, immediately around the city, the earth 
is penetrated by a great number of galleries or tunnels, run- 
ning for many miles under the surface, and difficult of access 
even to those most familiar with them. These' narrow pas- 
sages are now known as the Catacombs, and are usually four 
or six feet wide, and ten feet high. They were formed by 
the Romans in getting out sand for cement ; and as many of 
the Christians were laborers or slaves, they were probably 
well acquainted with the opportunity for concealment offer- 
ed by these arenarice, or sand-pits, where they had often la- 
bored at their humble toil. When persecution grew fierce, 
and the life of every Christian was in danger, the Church of 
Rome hid itself in the Catacombs. . Here, in these dismal 
passages, may still be seen a thousand traces of the suffer- 
ings and sorrows of the early Christians. Here are small 
chapels cut in the sides of the wall of sand, and provided 
with altars, fonts, and episcopal chairs, while above the chap- 
el a narrow opening is often excavated to the surface of the 
earth in order to admit a little light or air to the hidden con- 
gregation below. Other portions of the Catacombs were used 
as cemeteries for the burial of the Christian dead. Count- 
less tombs are seen rudely excavated in the earth, and usual- 



(') For the Catacombs consult Chnrch of the Catacombs, Maitland, who 
thinks (p. 17) they were originally sand-pits; and De Rossi. The are- 
narii, or sand-diggers, were probably slaves who eagerly embraced Chris- 
tianity. 



IN THE CATACOMBS. 15 

ly distinguished by an inscription indicating the position and 
character of the deceased. These inscriptions, indeed, form 
one of the most interesting traits of the Catacombs, and have 
been eagerly studied and copied by many ardent explorers. 
They bring into clear light the simplicity and fervor of the 
ancient faith. Here are no prayers for the dead, no address 
to the Yirgin or the saints. Upon one tomb is written, " He 
sleeps in Christ ;" over another, " May she live in the Lord 
Jesus !" Most of the inscriptions dwell upon the hope of a 
better life, and are full of resignation and faith. One, how- 
ever, shows in what gloom and terror the Church maintain- 
ed its existence. "O, mournful time," it reads, "in which 
prayer and sacred rites, even in caverns, afford no protec- 
tion !"0 

The bishops of Eome, with their terrified followers, were 
now the tenants of a subterranean home. They lived among 
tombs, in darkness and confinement, fed upon the scanty food 
brought them by stealth by faitlrf ul slaves or devoted women. 
Yet, if we may believe the common tradition, but few of the 
early bishops escaped martyrdom. They were pursued into 
the Catacombs, and were often murdered in the midst of 
their congregations. Stephen I., Bishop of Eome, lived many 
years, it is said, in these dismal retreats. Food was furnish- 
ed him from above, and wells and springs are found in the 
Catacombs. At length, however, the pagan soldiers traced 
him to his chapel, while he was performing service, and, when 
he had done, threw him back in his episcopal chair, and cut 
off his head at a blow. The pagan emperors in vain issued 
decrees forbidding the Christians to take refuge in the Cat- 
acombs; and although death was decreed to every one who 
was found there, these endless labyrinths were always thickly 
peopled. Ladies of rank hid in the sand-pits, and were fed 
by their faithful maids ; the rich and the poor found a com- 
mon safety in the recesses of the earth. When the heathen 
soldiers approached, the Christians would sometimes block up 

0) Maitland, p. 53 : "No worship of the Virgin is found, nor image-wor- 
ship." 



16 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

the passages with sand, and then escape to some distant part 
of the labyrinths where the persecutors did not venture to 
follow them. 

Long afterward, when all necessity for using them had for- 
ever passed away, the Catacombs were still looked upon with 
singular veneration by the Roman Christians as the scene of 
many a martyrdom, and the home of the persecuted Church. 
Here they would often assemble to celebrate their holiest 
rites, surrounded by the tombs of bishops and presbyters, 
and shut out from the world in the gloom of a subterranean 
darkness. St. Jerome relates that it was his custom, when a 
young student at Rome, to wander on Sundays to the Cata- 
combs, accompanied by his pious friends, descend into a deep 
cavern amidst the cultivated fields near the city, and enter by 
a path of winding steps the hallowed abode of the martyrs. 
His pious pilgrimage represents, no doubt, the common prac- 
tice of the Christians of his time. But as centuries passed 
away, the ancient usage was neglected, until at length even 
the very existence of the Catacombs was forgotten. It was 
only remembered that in the early ages the Christians had 
hidden in their cemeteries, and that the living had once been 
forced to seek shelter among the dead. In the year 1578 
Rome was startled by the intelligence that an ancient Chris- 
tian cemetery had been discovered, extending like a subter- 
ranean city around and beneath the Salarian Way. The Ro- 
man antiquarians and artists crowded to the spot, explored 
with earnest devotion the crumbling labyrinth, copied the 
numerous inscriptions, traced the moldering sculptures or the 
faded pictures on the walls, and revived the memory of the 
forgotten Church of the Catacombs. 

During this period of persecution and contempt the bish- 
ops of Rome gave little promise of that spiritual and tempo- 
ral grandeur to which they afterward attained. They are 
nearly lost to history ; a barren list of names is almost all 
that we possess. Yet the discovery of the writings of Hyp- 
polytus has lately thrown some new light upon the characters 
of several of the early bishops, and serves to show that the 
rulers of the Church were not always selected with discre- 



A DEFAULTING BISHOP. 17 

tion.Q Bishop Victor was stern, haughty, and overbearing; 
his successor, Zephyrinus, feeble, ignorant, avaricious, and ve- 
nal. But the next bishop, who ruled from 219 to 223, was 
even less reputable than his predecessors. Callistus, in early 
life, had been a slave in the family of Carpophorus, a wealthy 
Christian who was employed in the emperor's household. 
His master established Callistus as a banker in a business 
quarter of the city, and his bank was soon filled with the 
savings of prudent Christians and the property of widows 
and orphans. Callistus made away with the funds intrust- 
ed to his care, and, being called to account, fled from Rome. 
He was seized, brought back to the city, and condemned to 
hard labor in the public work-house. His master, however, 
obtained his release, forgave his offense, and employed him 
in collecting moneys which Callistus pretended were due him. 
Soon after, the defaulting banker was arrested for some new 
offense, and was condemned to be scourged and transported to 
the mines of Sardinia. He was again relieved from his sen- 
tence through the influence of powerful friends, returned to 
Rome, and became the favorite and counselor of the feeble 
Bishop Zephyrinus. When the latter died, Callistus succeed- 
ed him in the episcopal chair; and thus a public defaulter, 
snatched from the work-house and the mines, became the head 
of the Roman Church. 

In the last great persecution under Diocletian, the bishops 
of Rome probably fled once more to the Catacombs. Their 
churches were torn down, their property confiscated, their sa- 
cred writings destroyed, and a vigorous effort was made to ex- 
tirpate the powerful sect. But the effort was vain. Constan- 
tine soon afterward became emperor, and the Bishop of Rome 
emerged from the Catacombs to become one of the ruling 
powers of the world. This sudden change was followed by 
an almost total loss of the simplicity and purity of the days 
of persecution. Magnificent churches were erected by the 
emperor in Rome, adorned with images and pictures, where 
the bishop sat on a lofty throne, encircled by inferior priests, 

(*) Bunsen, Hippolytus. 

2 



18 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

and performing rights borrowed from the splendid ceremo- 
nial of the pagan temple. The Bishop of Home became a 
prince of the empire, and lived in a style of luxury and pomp 
that awakened the envy or the just indignation of the hea- 
then writer, Marcellinus. The Church was now enriched by 
the gifts and bequests of the pious and the timid ; the bish- 
op drew great revenues from his farms in the Campagna and 
his rich plantations in Sicily ; he rode through the streets of 
Rome in a stately chariot and clothed in gorgeous attire ; his 
table was supplied with a profusion more than imperial ; the 
proudest women of Rome loaded him with lavish donations, 
and followed him with their flatteries and attentions ; and his 
haughty bearing and profuse luxury were remarked upon by 
both pagans and Christians as strangely inconsistent with the 
humility and simplicity enjoined by the faith which he pro- 
fessed. 

The bishopric of Rome now became a splendid prize, for 
which the ambitious and unprincipled contended by force or 
fraud. The bishop was elected by the clergy and the popu- 
lace of the city, and this was the only elective office at Rome. 
Long deprived of all the rights of freemen, and obliged to 
accept the senators and consuls nominated by the emperors, 
the Romans seemed once more to have regained a new liber- 
ty in their privilege of choosing their bishops. They exer- 
cised this right with a violence and a factious spirit that show- 
ed them to be unworthy of possessing it. On an election-day 
the streets of Rome were often filled with bloodshed and riot. 
The rival factions assailed each other with blows and weap- 
ons. Churches were garrisoned, stormed, sacked, and burned ; 
and the opposing candidates, at the head of their respective 
parties, more than once asserted their spiritual claims by force 
of arms. 

About the middle of the fourth century, the famous Trini- 
tarian controversy swept over the world, and lent new ardor 
and bitterness to the internal contests of the Church of Rome. 
The Emperor Constantius was an Arian, and had filled all the 
Eastern sees with the prelates of his own faith. His adver- 
sary, the rigorous Athanasius, fled to Rome, and had there 



AX ABIAX POPE. 19 

thrown the spell of his master-mind over Pope and people. 
But Constantius was resolved to crush the last stronghold of 
Trinitarianism. Pope Liberius, won by the favors or terri- 
fied at the threats of the emperor, at first consented to a 
condemnation of the doctrine of Athanasius. But soon the 
mental influence of the great Alexandrian proved more pow- 
erful than the material impulse of Constantius. Liberius re- 
canted, proclaimed the independence of the Poman See, and 
launched the anathemas of the Church against all who held 
Arian opinions, and even against the emperor himself. All 
Pome rose in revolt in defense of its bishop and its creed; 
but the unhappy Liberius was seized at night, by the orders 
of the enraged Constantius, and carried away in exile to the 
shores of cold and inhospitable Thrace. He refused with con- 
tempt the money sent him by the emperor to pay the ex- 
penses of his journey. "Let him keep it," said he to the 
messengers, " to pay his soldiers. Do you presume to offer 
me alms as if I were a criminal?" he exclaimed. "Away! 
first become a Christian !" 

Two years of exile in barbarous Thrace, and the dread of a 
worse doom, seem to have shaken the resolution of the Pope. 
The emperor, too, had taken a still more effectual means of 
assailing the authority of his rebellious subject. Felix, an anti- 
pope, had been appointed at Pome, elected by three eunuchs, 
and Liberius now consented to renounce his communion with 
Athanasius. His people, and particularly the rich and noble 
women of Pome, had remained faithful to their exiled bishop ; 
and as he entered the city a splendid throng came forth to meet 
him, and welcomed him with a triumphal procession. Felix, 
the anti-pope, fled before him, but soon afterward returned, 
and it is said that the streets, the baths, and the churches were 
the scenes of a fierce struggle between the rival factions. 
Pome was filled with bloodshed and violence, until at last Li- 
berius triumphed, and closed his life in peace upon the throne 
of St. Peter. 

His death was the signal for new disorders, and two oppos- 
ing candidates, Damasus and Ursicinus, contended for the pa- 
pal chair. . The latter having occupied, with his adherents, the 



20 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

Julian Basilica, Damasus, at the head of a mob of charioteers, 
the hackmen of Rome, and a wild throng of the lowest of the 
people, broke into the sacred edifice, and encouraged a general 
massacre of its defenders. On another occasion Damasus as- 
sembled a force composed of gladiators, charioteers, and labor- 
ers, armed with clubs, swords, and axes, and stormed the Church 
of S. Maria Maggiore, where a party of the rival faction had 
intrenched themselves, and massacred one hundred and sixty 
persons of both sexes. The contest raged for a long time. 
Another frightful massacre took place in the Church of St. 
Agnes ; the civil powers in vain interfered to check the vio- 
lence of the pious factions, and at length the emperor was 
obliged to appoint a heathen prefect for the city, who, by his 
severe impartiality, reduced the Christians to concord. Daim 
asus, stained with bloodshed and raging with evil passions, 
was firmly seated on the episcopal throne, and seems to have 
obtained the admiration and the support of his contemporary, 
the impetuous St. Jerome. 

In the mean time the magnificent city was still divided be- 
tween the pagans and the Christians. A large part of the 
population still clung to the ancient faith. Many of the 
wealthiest citizens and most of the old aristocracy still sac* 
rificed to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and looked with scorn 
upon the fierce enthusiasts who had filled Rome with violence 
and disorder. In one street the pagan temple, rising in se- 
vere majesty, was filled with its pious worshipers, performing 
rites and ceremonies as ancient as Numa ; in the next the 
Christian Basilica resounded with the praises of the triune 
God. On one side the white-robed priest led the willing vic- 
tim to the altar, and inspected the palpitating entrails; on 
the other the Christian preacher denounced in vigorous ser- 
mons the follies of the ancient superstition. The contest, 
however, did not continue long. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, 
enforced the condemnation of paganism, and the last marks 
of respect were withdrawn from those tutelar deities who had 
so long presided over the destinies of Rome. 

The fourth century brought important changes in the con- 
dition of the bishops of Rome. It is a singular trait of the 



A HAUGHTY PRIESTHOOD. 21 

corrupt Christianity of this period that the chief characteris- 
tic of the eminent prelates was a tierce and ungovernable 
pride. Humility had long ceased to be numbered among 
the Christian virtues. The four great rulers of the Church 
(the Bishop of Rome and the patriarchs of Constantinople, 
Antioch, and Alexandria) were engaged in a constant strug- 
gle for supremacy. Q Even the inferior bishops assumed a 
princely statej and surrounded themselves with their sacred 
courts. The vices of pride and arrogance descended to the 
lower orders of the clergy ; the emperor himself was declared 
to be inferior in dignity to the simple presbyter, and in all 
public entertainments and ceremonious assemblies the proud- 
est layman was expected to take his place below the haughty 
churchman. As learning declined and the world sunk into 
a new barbarism, the clergy elevated themselves into a ruling 
caste, and were looked upon as half divine by the rude Goths 
and the degraded Romans. It is even said that the pagan 
nations of the West transferred to the priest and monk the 
same awe -struck reverence which they had been accustomed 
to pay to their Druid teachers. The Pope took the place of 
their Chief Druid, and was worshiped with idolatrous devo- 
tion ; the meanest presbyter, however vicious and degraded, 
seemed, to the ignorant savages, a true messenger from the 
skies. 

At Rome, the splendid capital, still untouched by the Goth, 
the luxury and pride of the princely caste had risen to a kind 
of madness. Instead of healing the wounded conscience or 
ministering to the sick and the poor, the fashionable presby- 
ter or deacon passed his time in visiting wealthy widows, and 
extracting rich gifts and legacies from his superstitious ad- 
mirers. A clerical fop of the period of Pope Damasus is 
thus described by the priestly Juvenal, St. Jerome: "His 
chief care is to see that his dress is well perfumed, that his 
sandals fit close to his feet; his hair is crisped with a eurl- 

C) Gieseler, i., p. 374. In 381, the second General Council gave the Bish- 
op of Constantinople the first rank after the Bishop of Rome : Sid to elvai 
avr-qv vkav Pio/xrjv. The appellation of patriarch might he given to any 
bishop in the fourth century. 



22 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

ing-pin; his fingers glitter with rings; he walks on tip -toe 
through the streets lest he may splash himself with the wet 
soil, and when you see him abroad yon would think him a 
bridegroom rather than a priest." " Both deacons and pres- 
byters," exclaims the monastic Jerome, " strive for the favor 
of women ;" and were, no doubt, in search of wealthy and 
high-born wives among the greatest families of Home. The 
first era of successful Christianity, indeed, was more luxuri- 
ous and corrupt than had been that of Augustus or Tiberius. 
The bishop lived in imperial pomp, the lower orders of the 
clergy imitated his license and his example ; the people were 
sunk in superstition and vice ; when suddenly a terrible puri- 
fication — a baptism of fire and blood — came upon the guilty 
city. 

This was no less than the total destruction of that costly 
fabric of civilization, the Roman Empire, which had been 
erected by the labors and sufferings of so many statesmen, 
warriors, philosophers, and had seemed destined to control 
forever the future of Europe and mankind. The northern 
races now descended upon the southern, and gained an easy 
victory. Knowledge ceased to be power, the intellectual sunk 
before the material, and the cultivated Romans showed them- 
selves to have wholly lost the faculty of self-defense — an ex- 
ample of national decay so often repeated in history that one 
can scarcely assert with confidence that any people is to remain 
exempted from it forever. A few thousand Goths or Huns 
were now more than a match for countless hosts of Romans ; 
they swept away the feeble defenders of Greece, Italy, and 
Gaul with the same ease that has since marked the progress 
of the British in Hindostan and Pizarro in Peru. The sav- 
ages blotted great cities from existence, restored vast tracts of 
cultivated country to its early wildness, and forced the Europe- 
an intellect to begin anew its slow progress toward supremacy. 

No part of the civilized world suffered more severely than 
its capital. Alaric entered Rome lighted by the flames of its 
finest quarters ; Genseric swept away almost its entire popula- 
tion. Famine, pestilence, and war fell upon the Eternal City. 
The numbers of its people decreased from one million to less 



POPE SILVERIUS. 23 

than fifty thousand ! A few plague-stricken and impoverish- 
ed citizens wandered amidst its vast and still splendid ruins ; 
the elegant and licentious priest, the high-born women, the 
men of letters, the luxurious nobles, and the factious people 
had been carried away into slavery, or had died of plague or 
famine ; and the Christian fathers, when they would convey 
to their auditors a clear conception of the Judgment-day, the 
final dissolution of all things earthly, would compare it to 
the fate of Rome. 

The bishops of Rome, during this eventful period, became 
the protectors and preservers of the city. Their sacred of- 
fice was still respected by the Arian Goths and Yandals ; the 
large revenues of the Church were applied to providing food 
for the starving people; and it is possible that suffering and 
humiliation had once more awakened something of the puri- 
ty of early Christianity in the minds of both priest and laity. 
The bishops, too, were sometimes the victims of wars or civil 
convulsions. Pope John, imprisoned as a traitor by the Ostro- 
gothic King Theodoric, languished and died in confinement. 
Silverius was deposed, exiled, and perhaps murdered, by that 
meekest of heroes, Belisarius, to gratify his imperious wife, 
Antonina. The successor of St. Peter was rudely summoned 
to the Pincian Palace, the military quarters of Belisarius. In 
the chamber of the conqueror sat Antonina on the bed, with 
her patient husband at her feet. "What have we done to 
you, Pope Silverius," exclaimed the imperious woman, " that 
you should betray us to the Goths?" In an instant the pall 
was rent from the shoulders of the unhappy Pope, he was 
hurried into another room, stripped of his dress and clothed 
in the garb of a simple monk, and his deposition was pro- 
claimed to the clergy of Rome. He was afterward given up 
to the power of his rival and successor, Yigilius, who ban- 
ished him to the island of Pandataria, and is supposed to have 
finally procured his death. 

Stained with crime, a false witness and a murderer, Yigil- 
ius had obtained his holy office through the power of two 
profligate women who now ruled the Roman world. Theo- 
dora, the dissolute wife of Justinian, and Antonina, her de- 



24 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

voted servant, assumed to determine the faith and the des- 
tinies of the Christian Chnrch. Vigilius failed to satisfy 
the exacting demands of his casuistical mistresses ; he even 
ventured to differ from them upon some obscure points of 
doctrine. His punishment soon followed, and the Bishop of 
Rome is said to have been dragged through the streets of Con- 
stantinople with a rope around his neck, to have been impris- 
oned in a common dungeon, and fed on bread and water. 
The papal chair, filled by such unworthy occupants, must have 
sunk low in the popular esteem, had not Gregory the Great, 
toward the close of the sixth century, revived the dignity of 
the office. 

Gregory was a Roman, of a wealthy and illustrious fami- 
ly, the grandson of Pope Felix II. Learned, accomplished, a 
fine speaker, a sincere Christian, in his youth he eclipsed all 
his contemporaries, was distinguished in the debates of the 
Senate, and finally became the governor of Rome. Q The 
emperor, when he visited Constantinople, treated him with 
marked confidence, and honors and emoluments seemed to 
have been showered upon the young Roman with no stinted 
hand. He was equally the favorite of the court and of the 
people, and all that the world could give lay at his command. 
But suddenly a startling change came over his active intel- 
lect ; the world grew cold and repulsive ; he stopped in his 
career of success and became a monk. He expended his 
wealth in founding monasteries ; he sold his gold and jewels, 
his silken robes and tasteful furniture, and lavished the pro- 
ceeds upon the poor. He resigned his high offices, and hav- 
ing entered a monastery which he had founded at Rome, per- 
formed the menial duties for his fellow - monks. His body 
was emaciated by terrible fastings and vigils, his health gave 
way, and his life hung by a single thread. The prayers of a 
pious companion alone snatched him from an early grave. 

From this severe discipline Gregory rose up a half-mad- 

O Gregory's numerous letters may be found in Migne's collection. See 
vol. Ixxviii., p. 140, etc. His letter to Bertha of England recommends 
Augustin and Laurentius to her care. 



GREGORY'S VISIONS. 25 

dened enthusiast. Angels seemed to float aroimd him wher- 
ever he moved ; demons fled at his approach. His monastery 
of St. Andrew, over which he became the abbot, was the scene 
of perpetual miracles. He cast out devils, and angels cluster- 
ed around his holy seat. One of the monks who had passed 
his whole time in singing psalms, when he died was cover- 
ed with white flowers by invisible hands ; and the fragrance 
of flowers for many years afterward arose from his tomb. 
Yet, like many enthusiasts, Gregory was capable of acts of 
excessive cruelty, and his convent was ruled with unsparing 
severity. Justus, the monk, who was also a physician, had 
watched over Gregory during a long sickness with affection- 
ate tenderness. He was himself seized with a mortal illness, 
and when he was dying confessed with bitter contrition that, 
contrary to the rules of the monastery, he had hoarded up 
three pieces of gold. The money was found, and the guilty 
monk was punished with singular cruelty. Gregory would 
suffer no one to approach the bed of the dying man ; no sa- 
cred rites, no holy consolation, soothed the accursed spirit as 
it passed away. The body was cast out upon a dunghill, 
together with the three pieces of gold, while all the monks 
who had assembled around it cried out, " Thy money perish 
with thee!" After Justus had lain in torment for thirty 
days, Gregory relented ; a mass was said for the afflicted soul, 
which returned to the earth to inform its companions that it 
had escaped from its fearful tortures. Such were the fancies 
of this superstitious age. 

Gregory was chosen Pope (590) by the united voice of the 
clergy, the senate, and the people of Rome, and the Emperor 
Maurice confirmed the election. But Gregory shrunk from 
assuming the holy office with real alarm. He even fled in 
disguise into the forest, but a pillar of fire hovering over his 
head betrayed him. He was seized and carried by force to 
the Church of St. Peter, and was there consecrated Supreme 
Pontiff. 

He might well have trembled at the thought of being in- 
trusted with the destiny of Christianity in those dark and 
hopeless days ; he might well have believed, as he ever did, 



26 TEE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

that the end of all things was at hand. The world was full 
of anarchy and desolation, and a universal horror rested upon 
the minds of men. From his insecure eminence at Rome, 
Gregory saw everywhere around him the wreck of nations 
and the misery of the human race. Germany was overrun 
by hordes of savages; France, half - barbarian, groaned be- 
neath the Merovingian rule; Britain had relapsed into pa- 
ganism under the Saxons ; Spain was held by the Arian Visi- 
goths ; Africa was fast becoming a desert ; while the feeble 
emperor at Constantinople was scarcely known or heard of in 
the dominions over which he held a nominal rule. Italy had 
become the prey of the fierce Lombards, and these ruthless 
savages plundered and desolated the peninsula from the Po 
to the Straits of Sicily. They massacred or sold into slavery 
the whole population of great cities, and made them so des- 
olate that hermits chose their ruins as a fitting abode ; they 
destroyed convents, monasteries, churches, and spared neither 
monks nor nuns ; the very air was tainted with carnage, and 
the Lombards seemed never sated with bloodshed. At length, 
in the earlier period of Gregory's pontificate, the Lombard 
hordes approached to destroy Rome. In the midst of one of 
his most effective sermons, the Pope was startled by the news 
that the enemy were at the gates. He broke off suddenly, ex- 
claiming, " I am weary of life ;" but he at once gave himself 
to the defense of the city. The gates were closed, the crum- 
bling walls were manned by trembling citizens, and the sav- 
age assailants retreated before the apparent vigor of the monk. 
Yet the environs and suburbs of the Holy City were involved 
in a general desolation. The people were swept away into 
captivity, the villas, the monasteries, and the churches sunk 
into smoldering ruins, and Gregory wept in vain over the woes 
of his unhappy people. 

From his ruined city Gregory began now to spread his in- 
tellectual influence over Europe. Never was there a more 
busy mind. He was the finest preacher of his age ; and his 
sermons, tinged with the fierce gloom of a monastic spirit, 
awoke the zeal of prelates and monks. His numerous letters, 
which still exist, show with what keen attention he watched 



GREGORY'S MENTAL INFLUENCE. 27 

and guided the conduct of his contemporaries. He wrote in 
tones of persuasive gentleness to Bertha, the fair Saxon Queen 
of Kent ; of bold expostulation to his nominal master, the 
Emperor Maurice of Constantinople. He corresponded with 
the bishops and kings of France and the Yisigothic rulers of 
Spain; he addressed his laborious but fanciful "Dialogues" 
to Theodelinda, Queen of the Lombards; he watched over 
the decaying churches of Africa and the feeble bishoprics of 
Greece ; he urged forward the conversion of England, and 
drove the timid Augustin to his missionary labors among 
the savage Saxons ; and his wonderful mental activity was 
finally rewarded by the complete triumph of the Eomish 
Church. Spain, England, France, and even the wild Loin- 
bards and Arian Goths, yielded to his vigorous assertion of the 
authority of the see of St. Peter. 

Gregory laid the foundation of that splendid ritual which 
to-day governs the services of Romish chapels and cathedrals 
from Yienna to Mexico, from Dublin to St. Louis. He knew 
the advantages of order, and his " Ordo Eomanus," his minute 
array of rites and ceremonies, drew together the Franks and 
Goths in a unison of religious observances. The world was 
to Gregory a vast monastery, in which perfect discipline was 
to be observed, and he everywhere enforced a strict unity of 
forms and conduct throughout all his great army of presby- 
ters and monks. 

But it was chiefly upon the power of music that Gregory 
relied for softening the cruel natures of Goth and Hun. Q 
His whole ritual was one of song and melody. He was born 
a musician, and he impressed upon the services of the Roman 
Church that high excellence in musical intonation which has 
ever been its distinguishing trait. His own choristers were 
renowned for their sweet voices and artistic skill, and tradi- 
tion represents the austere Pope, the master intellect of his 
age, as sitting among his singing-boys with a rod in his hand, 

(*) Burney, Hist. Music, ii., p. 16: "Augustin, at his first interview with 
the Saxon king, approached him singing a litany and a Gregorian chant. 
The French valued themselves upon their chanting, but the flexible voices 
of the Roman singers surpassed all others in the year 600." 



28 TEE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

chastising the careless and encouraging the gifted musician. 
The Gregorian chants indeed proved to have a singular charm 
for the savage races of the North. Q A band of trained sing- 
ers accompanied St. Augustin in his missionary labors in En- 
gland, and sometimes, it is related, proved more attractive 
than the most eloquent divines ; the Koman singing-masters, 
carefully instructed in Gregory's antiphonal, became the teach- 
ers of Europe ; Charlemagne, at a later period, founded sing- 
ing-schools in Germany upon the Gregorian system, and was 
himself fond of chanting matins in his husky voice — for nat- 
ure, so liberal to him in all other respects, had never designed 
him for a singer; and thus music became everywhere the 
handmaid of religion, and a powerful agent in advancing the 
Church of Rome. 

A faint trace of modesty and humility still characterized the 
Roman bishops, and they expressly disclaimed any right to the 
supremacy of the Christian world. The Patriarch of Constan- 
tinople, who seems to have looked with a polished contempt 
upon his Western brother, the tenant of fallen Rome and the 
bishop of the barbarians, now declared himself the Universal 
Bishop and the head of the subject Church. But Gregory re- 
pelled his usurpation with vigor.( 2 ) " "Whoever calls himself 
Universal Bishop is Antichrist," he exclaimed ; and he com- 
pares the patriarch to Satan, who in his pride had aspired to 
be higher than the angels. Yet, reasonable as Gregory was 
upon many points, his boundless superstition filled the age 
with terrible fancies. On every side he saw countless demons 
threatening destruction to the elect. Hell was let loose, and 
the earth swarmed with its treacherous occupants. But fort- 

C) Gregory probably imitated and revived the musical services of the 
pagan temples. See Migue, lxxviii., p. 865, and the Ordo Roinanus. 

( 2 ) Gregory I., who must have known his crimes, salutes the savage 
Phocas with devout joy. To Maurice he wrote indignantly against the 
usurper or rival, John, who claimed the universal bishopric. — Afigne, 
lxxv., p. 345, et seq. Migne's editor thinks the Constantinopolitan prel- 
ates " universalem prsefecturam forsitan in totum orbem Christianum et 
in ipsam Romanam Ecclesiam sibi viudicaturi, nisi eorum superbias quae 
semper ascendebat Romani pontifices obstitissent " (p. 347). 



TEE WORSHIP OF EELICS. 29 

unately for the Church, it possessed a spiritual armory which 
no demon could resist. The relics of the saints and the bones 
of the martyrs were talismans insuring the perfect safety of 
their possessor ; and one of St. Peter's hairs, or a filing from 
the chains of St. Paul, was thought a gift worthy of kings and 
queens. Gregory, too, had conversed with persons who had 
visited the realm of spirits and had been permitted to return 
to the earth. A soldier described such an adventure in lan- 
guage almost Yirgilian. He passed by a bridge over a dark 
and noisome river, and came to an Elysian plain, filled with 
happy spirits clothed in white, and dwelling in radiant man- 
sions. Above all a golden palace towered to the skies. Upon 
the bridge the visitor recognized one of his friends who had 
lately died, and who, as he attempted to pass, slipped, and was 
immediately seized by frightful demons, who strove to drag 
him beneath the stream ; but at the same moment angelic be- 
ings caught him in their arms, and a struggle began for the 
possession of the trembling soul. The result was never told. 
Gregory the Great died in 604, having established the pow- 
er of the Roman bishopric, and his successors assumed the ti- 
tle of pope.Q Under Gregory the Roman See became the ac« 
knowledged head of the Western Church. The next impor^ 
tant period in its history is the acquisition of its temporal do- 
minions by an unscrupulous intrigue with the usurping kings 
of France. Various circumstances had concurred to produce 
this change. The Roman Church had become the represent- 
ative and the chief defense of all the corruptions of the an- 
cient faith. It adopted the worship of the Virgin and the 
invocation of saints, the doctrine of purgatory, and the wild- 
est legends and traditions of the monkish writers ; it advo- 

C) Gregory I. rejected the title of Universal Bishop as blasphemous. 
"Sed absit a cordibus Christians nomen istud blasphemiae, in quo om- 
nium sacerdotum honor adimitur cum ab uno sibi dementer arrogatur" 
(lxxvii., p. 746). With what horror would the timid Pope have heard the 
title " Vicar of God," or the idea of infallibility, applied to himself. So to 
John he writes : " Quid ergo, frater carissime, in illo terribili examine ve- 
nientis judicii dicturus es, qui non solum pater, sed etiam generalis pater ? 
in mundo vocari appetis ?" (lxxvii., p. 742). 



30 TEE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

cated the celibacy of the clergy ; its churches were filled with 
images and relics, and its superstitious laity surpassed in blind 
idolatry the follies of their heathen ancestors. In the mean 
time the followers of Mohammed, issuing from their deserts, 
had conquered the East, Africa, and Spain, threatened Italy it- 
self with subjugation, and preached everywhere a single deity 
and an iconoclastic creed. While Christendom was filled with 
idolatry, the cultivated Arabs aspired to the purest conception 
of the Divine nature. The contrast became so startling as to 
awaken a sense of shame in the breast of Leo, the Isaurian, 
Emperor of the East. He began in 727-30 the famous icon- 
oclastic reform ; he ordered the images to be broken to pieces, 
the walls of the churches to be whitewashed, and prosecuted 
with honest but imprudent vigor his design of extirpating 
idolatry. But a fierce dissension at once raged throughout 
all Christendom, the monks and the people rose in defense of 
their images and pictures, and the emperor, even in his own 
capital, was denounced as a heretic and a tyrant. There was 
an image of the Saviour, renowned for its miraculous powers, 
over the gate of the imperial palace, called the Brazen Gate, 
from the rich tiles of gilt bronze that covered its magnificent 
vestibule. The emperor ordered the sacred figure to be taken 
down and broken to pieces. But the people from all parts of 
the city flew to the defense of their favorite idol, fell upon the 
officers, and put many of them to death. The women were 
even more violent than the men ; like furies they rushed to 
the spot, and, finding one of the soldiers engaged in his un- 
hallowed labor at the top of a ladder, they pulled it down 
and tore him to pieces as he lay bruised upon the ground. 
" Thus," exclaims the pious annalist, " did the minister of the 
emperor's injustice fall at once from the top of a ladder to the 
bottom of hell." The women next flew to the great church, 
and finding the iconoclastic patriarch officiating at the altar, 
overwhelmed him with a shower of stones and a thousand 
opprobrious names. He escaped, bruised and fainting, from 
the building. The guards were now called out, and the fe- 
male insurrection suppressed, but not until several of the 
women had perished in the fray. 



THE POPES DEFEND IMAGE -WOESHIP. 31 

The Pope, Gregory II., assumed the defense of image-wor- 
ship. The Italian provinces of the Greek emperor, known as 
the Exarchate, threw off the imperial authority rather than part 
with their images ; and it was these provinces that finally be- 
came the patrimony of St. Peter, and formed the chief part 
of the papal domain. A long struggle, however, arose for the 
possessions of the Greeks. The Lombard kings, always hos- 
tile to the Popes, sought to appropriate the Exarchate, and 
the acute Popes appealed for aid to the rising power of 
France. But it was not to the feeble Merovingian kings that 
they addressed themselves, but to Charles Martel and his am- 
bitious descendants. To gratify their own craving for tem- 
poral power, the Popes founded the new dynasty of the Car- 
lovingians. By the sanction and perhaps the suggestion of 
Pope Zacharias, the last of the phantom kings ceased to reign 
in France, and Pepin, the founder of the Carlovingians, as- 
cended the throne of Clovis. The powerful Franks now be- 
came the protectors of the papacy. Pepin, liberal to his spir- 
itual benefactor, gave to the Popes the Exarchate and protect- 
ed them from the Lombards ; and thus France, always Cath- 
olic and always orthodox, founded the temporal power of 
Pome. The Lombards, however, did not yield without a 
struggle. On one occasion they threatened Pome itself with 
destruction ; and the Pope, Stephen III., in an agony of terror, 
wrote two letters to Pepin claiming his protection. When 
the Frank neglected his appeals, the Pope ventured upon 
the most remarkable and the most successful of all the pious 
frauds. Pepin received a third letter, addressed to him by 
the Apostle Peter himself , in his own handwriting. St. Pe- 
ter and the Holy Yirgin, in this curious epistle, adjure the 
Frankish king to save their beloved city from the impious 
Lombards, and paradise and perpetual victory and prosperity 
are promised him as his rewards. Pepin obeyed the divine 
summons, entered Italy as the champion of St. Peter, and in 
755 bestowed upon the bishops of Pome the authority and the 
dominions of a temporal prince. The gift was afterward en- 
larged and confirmed by Charlemagne. This eminent man, 
who ruled over France, Germany, Italy, and a part of Spain, 



32 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

altogether destroyed the Lombard kingdom, and placed Leo 
III. securely on the papal throne. In return the grateful 
Pope crowned the half -barbarous Karl, Augustus and Emper- 
or of the West.Q It was on Christmas of the last year of 
the eighth century. Charles and his magnificent court were 
assembled at the celebration of the Nativity at Rome ; the Ro- 
man nobles and clergy looked on in a splendid throng ; the 
Pope himself chanted mass. At its close he advanced to 
Charles, placed a golden crown upon his head, and saluted 
him as Caesar Augustus. The assembly broke into loud ac- 
clamations, and Charles, with feigned or real reluctance, con- 
sented to be anointed by the hands of the Pope. 

From this time the Roman bishops began to take part in the 
politics of Europe. They made war or peace, formed leagues 
and unholy alliances, intrigued, plotted, plundered their neigh- 
bors, oppressed their subjects, and filled Italy and Europe with 
bloodshed and crime. The possession of temporal power, that 
" fatal gift," denounced by Dante and Milton, his translator, 
corrupted the sources of Western Christianity until it became 
the chief aim of the later Popes to enlarge their possessions 
by force or fraud, and add to those rich territories which they 
had won from the superstition of Pepin and the policy of 
Charlemagne. 

The great emperor died ; Europe fell into the anarchy of 
feudalism, and the bishops of Rome rose into new grandeur 
and importance. As the successors of St. Peter, they assert- 
ed their supremacy over kings and emperors, and claimed the 
right of disposing of crowns and kingdoms at will. St.Pe- 

C) Annales Veteres Francorum. Migne, second series, xcviii., pp. 1410- 
1430 : " Leo papa cum consilio omnium episcoporum sive sacerdotum seu 
Senatu Francorum, necnon et Romanorum, coronam auream capiti ejus 
imposuit, adjuncto et.iam populo, acclamant, Carolo Augusto a Deo coro- 
nato magno et pacifico imperator Romanorum vita et victoria." His title 
was Emperor of the Romans. So Odilbert addresses him, " Carolus Sere- 
nissimus Augustus a Deo coronatus pacificus imperator Romanorum gu- 
bernans imperium."— Migne, xcviii., p. 919. And Bryce, Holy German Em- 
pire, p. 205 : "Germany had adopted even the name of the Empire." It 
was Charlemagne's aim to assume the place of Constantine and Trajan. 



HILBEBBAND. 33 

ter no longer wrote humble letters asking aid from the bar- 
barous Frank ; he thundered from dismantled Kome in the 
menacing tone of command. The representative Pope of this 
new era was the illustrious, or the infamous, Hildebrand, the 
Caesar of the papacy. Hildebrand was the son of a carpenter,, 
but he was destined to rule over kings and nobles. His youth 
was marked by intense austerity, and he was a monk from 
his boyhood. He early entered upon the monastic life, but 
his leisure hours were passed in acquiring knowledge, and his 
bold and vigorous intellect was soon filled with schemes for 
advancing the power and grandeur of the Church. Small, 
delicate, and unimposing in appearance, his wonderful eyes 
often terrified the beholder. He came up to Eome, became 
the real master of the Church, and was long content to rule 
in a subordinate position. Pope after Pope died, but Hilde- 
brand still remained immovable, the guide and oracle of Rome. 
He revolved in secret his favorite principles, the celibacy of 
the clergy, the supremacy of the Popes, the purification of the 
Church. At length, in 1073, on the death of Alexander II., 
the clergy with one voice named Hildebrand the successor of 
St. Peter. He was at once arrayed in the scarlet robe, the 
tiara placed upon his head, and Gregory VII. was enthroned, 
weeping and reluctant, in the papal chair. 

His elevation was the signal for the most wonderful change 
in the character and purposes of the Church. The Pope as- 
pired to rule mankind. He claimed an absolute power over 
the conduct of kings, priests, and nations, and he enforced his 
decrees by the terrible weapons of* anathema and excommuni- 
cation. He denounced the marriages of the clergy as impi- 
ous, and at once there arose all over Europe a fearful struggle 
between the ties of natural affection and the iron will of Greg- 
ory. Heretofore the secular priests and bishops had married, 
raised families, and lived blamelessly as husbands or fathers, 
in the enjoyment of marital and filial love. But suddenly 
all this was changed. The married priests were declared pol- 
luted and degraded, and were branded with ignominy and 
shame. Wives were torn from their devoted husbands, chil- 
dren were declared bastards, and the ruthless monk, in the face 

3 



34 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

of the fiercest opposition, made celibacy the rule of the Church. 
The most painful consequences followed. The wretched wom- 
en, thus degraded and accursed, were often driven to suicide 
in their despair. Some threw themselves into the flames ; 
others were found dead in their beds, the victims of grief or 
of their own resolution not to survive their shame, while the 
monkish chroniclers exult over their misfortunes, and tri- 
umphantly consign them to eternal woe.Q 

Thus the clergy under Gregory's guidance became a mo- 
nastic order, wholly separated from all temporal interests, and 
bound in a perfect obedience to the Church. He next for- 
bade all lay investitures or appointments to bishoprics or oth- 
er clerical offices, and declared himself the supreme ruler of 
the ecclesiastical affairs of nations. No temporal sovereign 
could fill the great European sees, or claim any dominion over 
the extensive territories held by eminent churchmen in right 
of their spiritual power. It was against this claim that the 
Emperor of Germany, Henry IY., rebelled. The great bishop- 
rics of his empire, Cologne, Bremen, Treves, and many oth- 
ers, were his most important feudatories ; and should he suf- 
fer the imperious Pope to govern them at will, his own do- 
minion would be reduced to a shadow. And now began the 
famous contest between Hildebrand and Henry — between the 
carpenter's son and the successor of Charlemagne, between the 
Emperor of Germany and the Head of the Church. It open- 
ed with an adventure that marks well the wild and lawless 
nature of the time. On Christmas - eve, 1075, the rain pour- 
ed down in torrents at Rome, confining the people to their 
houses, while the Pope, with a few ecclesiastics, was keeping 
a holy vigil in the distant Church of Santa Maria Maggiore. 
The wild night and the favorable opportunity were seized 
upon by Cencius, a Roman baron, to wreak his vengeance 
upon Gregory for some former offense. His soldiers broke 
into the church while the Pope was celebrating mass, rushed 

(*) Migne, Greg. Pap. VII. Vita, vol. cxlviii., p. 153. Migne's editor insists 
that Gregory was of noble origin — "nobile genere ortus" — but adds, " Sunt 
qui dicunt eum infhno ac penes sordido loco natum," etc. But see Voigt, 
Papst Gregor VII. ; Delecluze, etc. 



GREGORY VII 35 

to the altar, and seized the sacred person of the pontiff. He 
was even wounded in the forehead ; and, being stripped of his 
holy vestments, was dragged away bleeding and faint, but pa- 
tient and unresisting, and was imprisoned in a strong tower. 
Two of the worshipers, a noble matron and a faithful friend, 
followed him to his prison. The man covered him with furs, 
and warmed his chilled feet in his own bosom ; the woman 
stanched the blood, bound up the wound, and sat weeping at 
his side. But the city was now aroused ; the bells tolled, the 
trumpets pealed, and the clergy who were officiating in the 
different churches broke off from their services, and summon- 
ed the people to the rescue of the Pope. As the morning 
dawned a great throng of his deliverers assembled around the 
place of Gregory's imprisonment, uncertain whether he were 
alive or dead. Engines were brought and planted against the 
tower; its walls began to tremble ; and the fierce Cencius, now 
terrified and despairing, threw himself at the Pope's feet, beg- 
ging his forgiveness. The patient Pope consented, and only 
imposed upon Cencius the penance of a pilgrimage to Jerusa- 
lem. In the mean time the people broke into the tower, and 
carried Gregory in triumph to the church from whence he had 
been taken, where he finished the sacred rites which had been 
so rudely interrupted. The assassin Cencius and his kindred 
were driven from the city, and their houses and strong towers 
were razed to the ground. 

It was plain to all that no physical danger could shake the 
iron resolution of Gregory : he next determined to humble 
the self- willed emperor. Henry, flushed with victory, sur- 
rounded by faithful bishops and nobles, attended by mighty 
armies, had refused, with petulant contempt, to obey the de- 
crees of Rome. Hildebrand summoned him to appear before 
his tribunal, and, if he should refuse to come, appointed the 
day on which sentence of excommunication should be pro- 
nounced against him. The emperor replied by assembling a 
council of his German nobles and priests, who proclaimed the 
deposition of the Pope. All Christendom seemed united to 
crush the Bishop of Rome ; the married clergy, the Simon- 
ists, and all who had received their investiture from temporal 



36 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

sovereigns, joined in a fierce denunciation of his usurpation. 
But Gregory called together a third council in the Lateran, 
and a miracle or an omen inspired the superstitious assembly. 
An egg was produced with much awe and solemnity, on which 
a serpent was traced in bold relief, recoiling in mortal agony 
from a shield against which it had vainly struck its fangs. 
The bishops gazed upon the prodigy with consternation, but 
Gregory interpreted it with the skill of a Roman augur. The 
serpent was the dragon of the Apocalypse ; its mortal agony 
foretold the triumph of the Church. A wild enthusiasm fill- 
ed the assembly, the anathema of Rome was hurled against 
Henry, his subjects were absolved from their allegiance, and 
the king was declared excommunicated. The effect of this 
spiritual weapon was wonderful : the power of the great, em- 
peror melted away like mist before the wind. His priests 
shrunk from him as a lost soul, his nobles abandoned him, his 
people looked upon him with abhorrence, and Henry was left 
with a few armed followers and a few faithful bishops in a 
lonely castle on the Rhine. 

Henry, with abject submission, now resolved to seek the 
forgiveness of the Pope in Rome. In mid-winter, accompa- 
nied by his wife, his infant son, and one faithful attendant, 
having scarcely sufficient money to pay the expenses of his 
travel, he set out to cross the Alps and throw himself at Greg- 
ory's feet.Q Never was there a more miserable journey. The 
winter was unusually severe, and great quantities of snow fill- 
ed up the Alpine passes. The slippery surface was not hard 
enough to bear the weight of the travelers, and even the most 
experienced mountaineers trembled at the dangers of the pas- 
sage. Yet the imperial party pressed on ; the king must reach 
Italy, or his crown was lost forever. When, after much toil 
and suffering, they reached the summit of the pass, the danger 
was increased. A vast precipice of ice spread before them so 
slippery and smooth that he who entered upon it could scarce- 

C) Voigt, p. 467: "Es war furchtbare Winter Kalte, so dass alle Flusse, 
selbst der Rhein, stark gefroren waren. Der Schnee im October des vori- 
gen Jahres gefalleu bedeekte das Land bis zu Elide des Marz." Bert. 
Constantin, an. 1077. 



THE EMPEROR AT CANOSSA. 37 

ly avoid being hurled into the depths below. Yet there was 
no leisure for hesitation. The queen and her infant son were 
wrapped in the skins of oxen and drawn down as if in a sled ; 
the king, creeping on his hands and knees, clung to the shoul- 
ders of the guides, and thus, half sliding, and sometimes roll- 
ing down the steeper declivities, they reached the plain un- 
harmed. Q 

Gregory, meanwhile, doubtful at first of Henry's real de- 
sign, had taken refuge in the Castle of Canossa, the mountain 
stronghold of his unchanging friend and ally, the great Count- 
ess Matilda. The praises of this eminent woman have been 
sung by poets and repeated by historians, but the crowning 
trait of her singular life was her untiring devotion to Greg- 
ory. For him she labored and lived ; on him her treasures 
were lavished ; her mountain castles were his refuge in mo- 
ments of danger ; her armies fought in his defense ; she was 
never satisfied unless the Pope was at her side ; and she made 
a will by which at her death all her rich possessions should re- 
vert to Gregory and the Church. Matilda was the daughter 
of Boniface, Margrave of Tuscany, and his only heir. A celi- 
bate although wedded, she had been married against her will 
to the Duke of Lorraine, and had parted forever from her un- 
welcome husband on her wedding-day. Hildebrand alone, the 
low-born and unattractive monk, had won the affections of the 
high-bred and self-willed woman ; they were inseparable com- 
panions in adversity or success, and the Pope owed his life, his 
safety, and his most important achievements to a member of 
that sex which he had so bitterly persecuted and contemned. 

To Canossa came Henry, the fallen emperor, seeking per- 
mission to cast himself at his enemy's feet.( 2 ) On a bitter 
winter morning, when the ground was covered deep with 

(*) Voigt, p. 468: "Der Konig langte zu Canossa an, nachdem er voraus 
selbst noch Italien betreten hatte, mehrere Gesandte an den Papst ge- 
sendet" (p. 417). 

( 2 ) Vita Matbildis, Migne, cxlviii. : "■ Cunique dies starent per tres pro 
pace loquentes et pax non esset, rex atque recedere vellet," etc. Said 
Prince Bismarck, in 1873, "We will not go to Canossa;" and Germany 
still remembers its humiliation. 



38 THE BISHOPS OF BOME. 

snow, he approached the castle gate, and was admitted within 
the first of the three walls that sheltered Gregory and Matil- 
da. Clothed in a thin white linen dress, the garb of a peni- 
tent, his feet bare, his head uncovered, the king awaited all 
day, in the outer court, the opening of the gate which should 
admit him to the presence of Gregory. But the relentless 
Pope left him to shiver in the cold. A second and a third 
day Henry stood as a suppliant before the castle gate, and, 
hungry, chilled, disheartened, besought admission, but in vain. 
The spectators who witnessed his humiliation were touched 
with compassion, and every heart but that of Gregory soften- 
ed toward the penitent king. At length Henry was admitted 
to the presence of the compassionate Matilda, fell on his knees 
before her, and besought her merciful interference. Gregory 
yielded to her prayers, and the Pope and his rightful lord, 
whom he had subjugated, met at a remarkable interview. 
Tall, majestic in figure, his feet bare and still clad in a peni- 
tential garb, the haughty Henry bowed in terror and contri- 
tion before the small and feeble gray-haired old man who had 
made kings the servants of the Church. 

Henry subscribed to every condition the Pope imposed; 
obedience to ecclesiastical law, perfect submission to the Pope, 
even the abandonment of his kingdom, should such be Greg- 
ory's will. On these terms he was absolved, and with down- 
cast eyes and broken spirit returned to meet the almost con- 
temptuous glances of his German or Lombard chiefs. Yet 
no man at that moment was so bitterly hated by hosts of foes 
as the triumphant Gregory. Christendom, which had yielded 
to his severe reforms, abhorred the reformer; Italy shrunk 
from his monastic rigor ; even Kome was unquiet, and Hilde- 
brand's only friends were his faithful Countess and the Nor- 
man conquerors of Naples. 

No sooner had Henry left Canossa than he seemed sudden- 
ly to recover from that strange moral and mental prostration 
into which his adversary's spiritual arts had thrown him. He 
was once more a king. He inveighed in bitter terms against 
the harshness and pride of Gregory; his Lombard chiefs 
gathered around him and stimulated him to vengeance, while 



GEEGOEY DELIVEEED BY THE NOEMANS. 39 

Matilda hurried the Pope back again, fearful for his life, to 
the impregnable walls of Canossa. But the dangerous condi- 
tion of his German dominions for a while delayed his plans 
of vengeance. The German and Saxon princes and bishops 
who had abandoned him in his moment of humiliation, now 
fearful of his power, met in a solemn diet at Forchheim, 
deposed Henry, and elected Rudolph of Swabia in his place. 
A terrible civil war, nourished by the arts of Gregory, desolated 
all Germany. The Pope once more excommunicated Henry, 
and declared his rival king ; and he even ventured to prophesy 
that, unless Henry made his submission by the 29th of June, 
the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul, he would either be de- 
posed or dead. The fierce priest, assuming to speak by in- 
spiration, was willing to be judged by the failure or the suc- 
cess of his vaticination. But the result was far different from 
his hopes. Henry met his adversary, Rudolph, on the field of 
Elster ; the Saxons conquered, but Rudolph was slain. His 
death allowed Henry to turn his arms against his spiritual foe 
at Rome. He crossed the Alps into Italy, but not as he had 
crossed them four years before, a heart-broken and trembling 
suppliant weighed down by superstitious dread. Excom- 
munication had lost its terrors ; Gregory had been proved a 
false prophet and a deceiver, and Matilda's forces, defeated 
and disheartened, had fled to their strongholds in the Apen- 
nines. Henry advanced, unchecked, to the walls of Rome, and 
laid siege to the Holy City.Q Gregory, whom no dangers 
could move, firm in his spiritual superiority, made a bold de- 
fense ; his people were united in his cause, the countess sup- 
plied him with considerable sums of money, and for three 
years the massive walls repelled the invader, and the Italian 
saw with natural exultation the host of abhorred Germans 
and Lombards decimated by malarias, disease, and perpetual 
fevers. At length, however, the city fell, Gregory retreated 

(*) Matilda was to Hildebrand another Martha. " Cui servat ut altera 
Martha." In his distress, "Arma, voluptatem, famulos, gazam, propri- 
amque excitat, expendit." Migne, cxlviii., p. 1003. Says Voigt : " Ma- 
thilda zeigte schon in diesen Zeiten " (in early youth) " unbegranzte Au- 
hanglichkeit an den romischen Stuhl." 



40 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

into the Castle of St. Angelo — a temporary refuge from the 
vengeance he had invoked — and Henry caused a rival Pope, 
under the name of Clement III., to be consecrated in St. Pe- 
ter's, and received from his hands the imperial crown. 

Gregory's end seemed now drawing near. Famine and the 
sword must soon drive him from his retreat, and he well knew 
that he would receive short shrift from his enraged German 
lord. But at this moment news came that Robert Guiscard, 
at the head of a powerful force, was advancing from Southern 
Italy to his rescue. Henry retreated, and the Norman soon 
became master of Pome. Gregory was released, and respect- 
fully conducted to the Lateran Palace ; but a fatal event made 
his return to power the source of incalculable woes to his 
faithful people. The army that had conquered Pome was 
composed of half-savage Normans and iniidel Saracens — the 
peculiar objects of hatred to the Poman populace — and they 
had marked their entry into the city by a general pillage and 
license. The Pomans resolved upon revenge. While the 
Normans were feasting in riotous security, they rose in revolt, 
and began a terrible carnage of their conquerors. The Nor- 
mans, surprised, but well disciplined, soon swept the streets 
with their cavalry, while the citizens fought boldly from their 
houses, and seemed for a moment to gain the superiority. 
Guiscard then gave orders to set fire to the houses. The city 
was soon in flames ; convents, churches, palaces, and private 
dwellings fed the conflagration; the people rushed wildly 
through the streets, no longer thinking of defense, but only of 
the safety of their wives and children ; while the fierce Nor- 
mans and Saracens, maddened by their treachery, perpetrated 
all those horrible deeds that mark the sack of cities. Pome 
suffered more in this terrible moment than in all the invasions 
of the Goths and Yandals. Thousands of its citizens were 
sold into slavery or carried prisoners to Calabria, and its mis- 
erable ruin was only repaired when a new city was gradually 
built in a different site on the ancient Campus Martius.Q 

(*) Voigt, p. 613 : "In Kobert's Schaaren war eine bedeutende Zahl Sara- 
cenen, die weder Mass noch Ziel kannten." The horrors of the sack sur- 



DEATH OF GREGORY VII. 41 

Gregory, it is said, looked calmly on the sack of his faithful 
city. For its destroyers he had no word of reproof. The 
ferocious Guiscard was still his ally and his protector. He 
retired, however, to Salerno, being afraid to trust himself in 
Rome, and from thence issued anew an excommunication 
against Henry and the usurping pontiff, Clement III. As 
death approached, no consciousness of the great woes he had 
occasioned, of the fierce wars he had stirred up, of the ruin he 
had brought upon Germany, of the desolation he had spread 
over Italy, of the miserable fate of Rome, seems to have dis- 
turbed his sublime serenity. At one moment he had believed 
himself a prophet, at another an infallible guide ; he was al- 
ways the vicegerent of Heaven ; and just before his death he 
gave a general absolution to the human race, excepting only 
Henry and his rival Pope. He died May 25th, 1085, having 
bequeathed to his successors the principle that the Bishop of 
Rome was the supreme power of the earth. This was the 
conception which Gregory plainly represents. 

The idea was never lost to his successors. It animated the 
Popes of the eleventh century in their long struggle against 
the Emperors of Germany; it stimulated the ardor of the 
Guelphic faction, whose vigor gave liberty to Italy ; but its 
full development is chiefly to be traced in the character of In- 
nocent III-C) Of all the Bishops of Rome, Innocent approach- 
ed nearest to the completion of Gregory's grand idea. He 
was the true Universal Bishop, deposing kings, trampling upon 
nations, crushing out heresy with fire and the sword, relentless 
to his enemies, terrible to his friends — the incarnation of spirit- 
ual despotism and pride. In the year 1198, at the age of thir- 
ty-seven, in the full strength of manhood, Innocent ascended 
the papal throne. His learning was profound, his morals 
pure ; he was descended from a noble Italian family ; he had 

passed all the earlier woes of Rome. So Voigt, p. 613. Says Delecluze, 
Gregoire VII. (1844) : "La plume se refuse a tracer les horreurs sanglantes 
qui eurent lieu," etc. 

(*) Gesta Innocentii PP. III., ab auctore anonymo. Migne, vol. ccxiv. 
His numerous letters show his imperious disposition, his wide ambition, 
and his active mind. 



42 THE BISHOPS OF HOME. 

already written a work on " Contempt of the World, and the 
Misery of Human Life," and his hanghty and self-reliant in- 
tellect was well fitted to subdue that miserable world which 
he so pitied and contemned. Yet his ruthless policy filled 
Europe with bloodshed and woe. He interfered in the affairs 
of Germany, and for ten years, with but short intervals of 
truce, that unhappy land was rent with civil discord. He de- 
posed his enemy, the Emperor Otho, and placed Frederick II., 
half infidel, half Saracen, the last of the Hohenstaufens, on 
the German throne. He ruled over Rome and Italy with an 
iron hand. But it was in France and England that the des- 
potic power of the Church was felt in its utmost rigor, and 
both those mighty kingdoms were reduced to abject submis- 
sion to the will of the astute Italian. France, in the year 
1200, was ruled by the firm hand of the licentious, self-willed, 
but vigorous Philip Augustus. Philip, after the death of his 
first wife, Isabella of Hainault, had resolved upon a second 
marriage. He had heard of the rare beauty, the long bright 
hair, the gentle manners of Ingeburga, sister to the King of 
Denmark, and he sent to demand her hand. The Dane con- 
sented, and the fair princess set sail for France, unconscious of 
the long succession of sorrows that awaited her in that south- 
ern land. The nuptials were celebrated, the queen was crown- 
ed ; but from that moment Philip shrunk from his bride with 
shuddering horror. No one could tell the cause, nor did the 
king ever reveal it. Some said that he was under the influ- 
ence of a demon, some that he was bewitched. Yet certain it 
is that he turned pale and shuddered at the very sight of the 
gentle and beautiful Ingeburga, that he hated her with intense 
vigor, and that he sacrificed the peace of his kingdom, the 
welfare of his people, and very nearly his crown itself, rather 
than acknowledge as his wife one who was to him all gentle- 
ness and love. At all hazards, he resolved to obtain a divorce, 
and the obsequious clergy of France soon gratified his wishes 
in this respect, upon the pretense that the ill-assorted pair 
were within the degree of consanguinity limited by the Church. 
The marriage was declared dissolved. When the news of her 
humiliation was brought to the unhappy stranger-queen, she 



INNOCENT III. AND PHILIP AUGUSTUS. 43 

cried out, in her broken language, " Wicked, wicked France ! 
Eome, Kome !"Q She refused to return to Denmark to be- 
tray her disgrace to her countrymen, but shut herself up in a 
convent, where her gentleness and her piety won the sympa- 
thy of the nation. 

Philip, having thus relieved himself forever, as he no doubt 
supposed, of his Danish wife, began to look round for her suc- 
cessor. Three noble ladies of France, however, refused his 
offers, distrustful of his fickle affections; a fourth, Agnes, 
daughter of the Duke of Meran, was more courageous, and 
was rewarded by a most unusual constancy. To the fair Ag- 
nes, Philip gave his heart, his hand, his kingdom. His love 
for her rose almost to madness. For her he bore the anathe- 
mas of the Church, the hatred of his people, the murmurs of 
his nobles, the triumph of his foes. Beautiful, young, intelli- 
gent, graceful, Agnes seems to have well deserved the devo- 
tion of the king. Her gentle manners and various accom- 
plishments won the hearts of the gallant chivalry of France, 
and even touched and softened her enemies — the austere cler- 
gy. She bore the king three children, and his affection for 
her never ceased but with her death. Miserable, however, 
was the fate of the rival queen. Ingeburga, in her distress, 
had appealed to Rome ; her brother, the King of Denmark, 
pressed her claims upon the Pope ; while Philip, enraged at 
her obstinacy, treated her with singular cruelty. She was 
dragged from convent to convent, from castle to castle, to in- 
duce her to abandon her appeal ; her prayers and her entreat- 
ies were received with cold neglect, and she who was entitled 
to be Queen of France was the most ill-used woman in the 
land. 

She was now at last to find a champion and a protector. 
Innocent, soon after his accession, resolved to interfere in the 
affair, and to build up the grandeur of his see upon the misfort- 
unes of two unhappy wives and the violent king. Ingeburga, 
however gentle and resigned, had never ceased to assert open- 

( J ) Gesta, p. 95 : "Flens et ejulans exclamavit, Mala Francia, mala Fran- 
da ! et adjecerat, Boma, Boma !" 



44 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

ly her marital claims ; she pursued her recreant husband with 
a persistency only equaled by his own obstinate aversion to 
her person, and she now joined with Innocent in a last effort 
to reclaim him.Q The Pope sent a legate into France with a 
command to Philip to put away the beautiful Agnes, and re- 
ceive back the hated Dane. If he did not comply with the or- 
ders of his spiritual father within thirty days, France was to 
be laid under an interdict, and the sin of the sovereign was to 
be visited upon his unoffending people. Philip, enraged rath- 
er than intimidated, treated Innocent's message with contempt ; 
the thirty days expired, and the fatal sentence was pronounced. 
For the first time in the annals of Rome it ventured to inflict 
a spiritual censure upon a whole nation ; for the effect of an 
interdict was to close the gates of heaven to mankind. All 
over gay and prosperous France rested a sudden gloom. ( 2 ) The 
churches were closed, and the worshipers driven from their 
doors ; the rites of religion ceased ; marriages were celebrated 
in the church-yards ; the bodies of the dead were refused bu- 
rial in consecrated ground, and flung out to perish in the cor- 
rupted air ; baptism and the last unction were the only services 
allowed ; the voice of prayer and praise ceased throughout the 
land; and the French with astonishment found themselves 
condemned to eternal woe for the sin of Philip and fair Agnes 
of Meran. 

The punishment seemed no doubt irrational and extravagant 
even to the clouded intellect of that half -savage age ; but it 
was no less effectual. Philip sought to prevent the enforce- 
ment of the interdict by punishing the clergy who obeyed it ; 
and he swore that he would lose half his kingdom rather than 
part with Agnes. But Innocent enforced the obedience of the 
priests, France grew mutinous under its spiritual sufferings, 
and the king was forced to submit. " I will turn Mohammed- 

( x ) Innocent's letter to Philip is excellent, yet he was willing to sacrifice 
all France to an imperious church. See Migne, vol. ii. Innocent III., p. 
87 : " Sane nee timor Domini nee reverentia sedis apostolic® matris tuae/' 
etc. 

( 2 ) Gesta, p. 99 : " Sicque tota terra regis Francorum arctissimo est inter- 
dicto conclusa." 



PHILIP SUBDUED. 45 

an," he cried, in his rage. " Happy Saladin, who has no Pope 
above him !" Agnes, too, wrote a touching letter to the Pope, 
in which she said " she cared not for the crown ; it was on the 
husband that she had set her love. Part me not from him." 
But Innocent never relented. Agnes was torn from her hus- 
band and her love, and was confined in a lonely castle in Nor- 
mandy, where she was seen at times wandering upon the bat- 
tlements with wild gestures and disheveled hair, her face wan 
and pale, her eyes streaming with tears, and then was seen no 
more. Nor was Ingeburga more happy. She was conducted, 
indeed, by a train of Italian priests to the arms of her loathing 
husband, and, whether witch or woman, Philip was forced to 
receive her publicly as his wife. France rejoiced, for the in- 
terdict was removed ; a clang of bells announced the return of 
spiritual peace ; the curtains were withdrawn from crucifixes 
and images ; the doors of churches flew open ; and a glad 
throng of worshipers poured into the holy buildings, from 
which for seven months they had been rigidly excluded. Yet 
the change brought little joy to the Queen of France. For 
the remainder of her life her husband treated her sometimes 
with harshness, always with neglect and contempt, and her 
plaintive appeals against his cruelty sometimes reached the 
ears of Innocent at Rome, who would then remonstrate with 
Philip upon his unworthy conduct toward the daughter, the 
sister, and the wife of a king. 

The Pope next turned his spiritual arms against England, 
and soon reduced that powerful and independent kingdom to 
the condition of a vassal of the Roman See. John, the wick- 
edest and the basest of English kings, now sat on the throne. 
His life had been stained by almost every form of licentious- 
ness and crime ; he had murdered his nephew, Arthur, and 
usurped his crown ; he had shrunk from no enormity, and his 
subjects looked upon him with horror and disgust ; Philip had 
torn from him all his continental possessions ; and his coward- 
ice had been as conspicuous as his vices. Yet John had ever 
remained the favorite son of the Church, and Innocent would 
still have continued his ally and his friend had not a sudden 
quarrel made them, for the moment, the bitterest of foes. It 



46 TEE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

would be impossible for us to review the full particulars of 
this memorable affair. It is sufficient to say that Innocent 
claimed the right of controlling the election of the Archbish- 
op of Canterbury, and that John resisted his pretension. The 
Pope employed the instrument which had been so effective 
against France ; in 1208 England was laid under an interdict, 
and for four years beheld its churches closed, its dead cast out 
into unconsecrated ground, and its whole religious life crushed 
beneath a fatal malediction. Yet John resisted the clerical as- 
sailant with more pertinacity than Philip, and even endured 
the final penalty of excommunication, and it was not until In- 
nocent had bestowed England upon Philip, and that king had 
prepared a considerable army to invade his new dominions, 
that John's courage sunk. Full of hatred for the Pope and 
for religion, it is said that he had resolved to become a Mo- 
hammedan, and sent embassadors to the Caliph of Spain and 
Africa offering to embrace the faith of the Koran in return for 
material aid ; and it is further related that the cultivated Mo- 
hammedan rejected with contempt the advances of the Chris- 
tian renegade. So low, indeed, was sunk the moral dignity of 
Christianity under the papal rule, so oppressive was that pow- 
er, that of the three great potentates of Christendom at this 
period, Frederick II. was suspected of preferring the Koran to 
the Bible, and both Philip Augustus and John are believed to 
have entertained the desire of adopting the tenets of the Ara- 
bian impostor ; and all three were no doubt objects of polish- 
ed scorn to the cultivated Arabs of Bagdad and Cordova. 

John was soon reduced to submission, and his conduct was 
so base and dastardly as to awaken the scorn of his own sub- 
jects and of Europe.Q He gave up his independent kingdom 
to be held as a fief of the Roman See, took the oath of fealty 
to Innocent, and bound himself and his successors to become 
the vassals of an Italian lord. But his shame was probably 
lightened by a sense of the bitter disappointment which he 



( ] ) Innocent to John. Migne, vol. iii., p. 925, Epist. : " Quod, tu, fili charis- 
sime, prudenter attendens," etc. The Pope accepts the gift of England, 
and confers it as a fief upon John aud bis heirs. 



THE ALBIGENSES. 47 

was thus enabled to inflict upon his enemy, Philip Augustus. 
The Pope, with his usual indifference to the claims of honor 
and of faith, now prohibited the King of France from pros- 
ecuting his designs against England ; and Philip, who at a 
great expense had assembled all the chivalry of his kingdom, 
was forced to obey. The barons of England soon after wrest- 
ed from their dastard king the Magna Charta, and Innocent 
in vain endeavored to weaken the force of that instrument 
which laid the foundation of the liberties of England and of 
America. 

But it is chiefly as the first of the great persecutors that In- 
nocent III. has deserved the execration of posterity. He was 
the destroyer of the Albigenses and the troubadours, and the 
first buds and flowers of European literature were crushed by 
the ruthless hand of the impassive Bishop of Kome. Langue- 
doc and Provence, the southern provinces of modern France, 
were at this period the most civilized and cultivated portions 
of Europe. Amidst their graceful scenery, their rich fields, 
and magnificent cities, the troubadours had first sung to the 
lute those plaintive love-songs, borrowed from the intellectual 
Arabs, which seemed to the rude but impassioned barons of 
the South almost inspired. The Gay Science found its fitting 
birthplace along the soft shores of the Mediterranean Sea, the 
Courts of Love were held of tenest at Montpellier, Toulouse, or 
Marseilles. The princes and nobles of that southern clime 
were allowed to be the models of their age in chivalry, good- 
breeding, and a taste for poetry and song ; and the people of 
Languedoc and Provence lived in a luxurious ease, rich, hap- 
py, and secure. Upon this Eden Innocent chanced to turn 
his eyes and discover that it was infested by a most fatal form 
of heresy. The troubadours — gay, witty, and indiscreet — had 
long been accustomed to aim sharp satires at the vices or the 
superstitions of monks and bishops ; the people had learned to 
look with pity and contempt upon the ignorance of their spir- 
itual guides; the authority of the Church was shaken ; the 
priest was despised, and the "Waldensian and Albigensian doc- 
trines made rapid progress and found an almost universal ac- 
ceptance in the sunny lands of the South of France. Eay- 



48 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

mond VI., Count of Toulouse, now reigned with an easy sway 
over this delightful territory. He was believed to be a here- 
tic, yet he was evidently no Puritan. Gay, licentious, gener- 
ous, affable, the count had three wives living at the same time, 
and might well have merited, by his easy morals, the confi- 
dence of the Church of Rome. But, unhappily for Raymond, 
his humanity surpassed his faith, and drove him to his ruin. 
Innocent was resolved to extirpate heresy by fire and sword, 
and Raymond was required to execute the papal commands 
upon his own people. He was to bring desolation to the fair 
fields of Languedoc, to banish or destroy the heretics, to lay 
waste his own happy dominions, depopulate his cities, cut off 
the wisest and best of his subjects, for the sake of a corrupt 
and cruel Church, which he must now more than ever have 
abhorred. Life meanwhile had flowed on for the happy peo- 
ple of Languedoc in mirth and perpetual joy. They sung, 
they danced; the mistress was more honored than the saint, 
and churches and cathedrals were abandoned for the Courts 
of Love. In the fair city of Toulouse a perfect tolerance pre- 
vailed.Q The " good men" of Lyons, the Cathari or Puritans, 
made converts undisturbed, and even the despised and reject- 
ed Jews were received with signal favor by the good-humored 
Provencals. Nothing was hated but the bigotry and pride of 
priestcraft ; and when Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, a severe and 
stern missionary of Rome, came to preach against heresy and 
reclaim the erring to the orthodox faith, his most vigorous 
sermons were received with shouts of ridicule. " The more he 
preached," says the Provencal chronicler, " the more the peo- 
ple laughed and held him for a fool." But a terrible doom was 
now impending over the merry land of song, for Innocent 
had resolved to call in the aid of the temporal power, and in- 
volve both Raymond and his subjects in a common ruin. A 
fatal event urged him to immediate action. The papal legate 
was assassinated as he was crossing the Rhone, and the Pope 
charged the crime upon Raymond, who, however, was wholly 
guiltless. The blood of the martyr called for instant venge- 

C) See Fauriel, Provencals, and the Provencal accounts. 



DEATH OF THE TROUBADOURS. 49 

ance, and Innocent summoned the king, the nobles, and the 
bishops of France to a crusade against the devoted land. 
"Up, most Christian king," he wrote to Philip Augustus; 
" up, and aid us in our work of vengeance !" His vengeful 
cries were answered by a general uprising of the chivalry and 
the bishops of the North of France, who, led by Simon de 
Montfort, hastened to the plunder of their brethren of the 
South. An immense army suddenly invaded Languedoc ; the 
war was carried on with a barbarity unfamiliar even to that 
cruel age ; and the Albigenses and the troubadours were almost 
blotted from existence. No quarter was given, no mercy 
shown, and the battle-cry of the invading army was, " Slay all. 
God will know his own." At the capture of Beziers it is es- 
timated that fifty thousand persons perished in the massacre. 
Harmless men, wailing women, and even babes at the breast 
fell equally before the monkish rage of Innocent, and the 
beautiful city was left a smoldering ruin. At the fall of 
Minerve, a stronghold in the Cevennes, one hundred and forty 
women, rather than change their faith, leaped into a blazing 
pyre and were consumed. When Lavaur, a noted seat of her- 
esy, was taken, a general massacre was allowed ; and men, 
women, and children were cut to pieces, until there was noth- 
ing left to kill, except four hundred of the garrison, who were 
burned in a single pile, which, to the great joy of the victo- 
rious Catholics, made a wonderful blaze. After a long and 
brave resistance, the Albigensian armies were destroyed, and 
the desolate land, once so beautiful, fell wholly into the power 
of the Catholics. The song of the troubadour was hushed 
forever, the gay people sunk into melancholy under the monk- 
ish rule, their very language was proscribed, and a terrible in- 
quisition was established to crush more perfectly the lingering 
seeds of heresy. Every priest and every lord was appointed an 
inquisitor, and whoever harbored a heretic was made a slave. 
Even the house in which a heretic was found was to be razed 
to the ground ; no layman was permitted to possess a Bible ; 
a reward of a mark was set for the head of a heretic ; and all 
caves and hiding-places where the Albigenses might take ref- 
uge were to be carefully closed up by the lord of the estate. 

4 



50 THE BISHOPS OF BO ME. 

Two agents of rare vigor had suddenly appeared to aid In- 
nocent in his conquest of mankind ; two men of singular mor- 
al and mental strength placed themselves at his command^ 1 ) 
St. Dominic and St. Francis of Assisi founded, under his su- 
pervision, the two great orders of mendicant monks. Dominic 
was a Spaniard of high birth, fierce, dark, gloomy, unsparing, 
the author of the Inquisition. His history is lost in a cloud 
of miracles, in which it has been enveloped by his devout dis- 
ciples ; he cast out Satan, who ran from him in the form of a 
great black cat with glittering eyes ; he raised the dead, heal- 
ed the sick, and more than equaled the miracles of the Gospel. 
Yet the real achievements of Dominic are sufficiently wonder- 
ful. He founded the order of preaching friars, who, living 
upon alms and bound to a perfect self-denial, knew no master 
but Dominic and the Pope, and before he died he saw a count- 
less host of his disciples spread over every part of Europe. 
Dominic is chiefly known as the persecutor of the heretics. 
He infused into the Roman Church that fierce thirst for blood 
which was exemplified in Philip II. and Alva; he hovered 
around the armies that blasted and desolated Languedoc, and 
his miraculous eloquence was aimed with fatal effect against 
the polished freethinkers of that unhappy land. His admir- 
ers unite in ascribing to him the founding of the Inquisition. 
"What glory, splendor, and dignity," exclaims one of them, 
"belong to the Order of Preachers words can not express! 
for the Holy Inquisition owes its origin to St. Dominic, and 
was propagated by his faithful followers." 

St. Francis of Assisi, a gentler madman, was equally suc- 
cessful with Dominic in founding a new order of ascetics. 
Born of a wealthy parentage, Francis passed his youth in 
song and revel until a violent fever won him from the world. 
His mild and generous nature now turned to universal benev- 
olence; he threw aside his rich dress and joined a troop of 
beggars ; he clothed himself in rags and gave all that he had 
to the poor. His bride, he declared, was Poverty, and he would 
only live by mendicancy ; he resolved to abase himself below 

( J ) Milrnan. Lat. Christ.; Gieseler, Eccl. Hist. 



MEXDICAXT ORDERS. 51 

the meanest of his species, and he devoted himself to the care 
of lepers — the outcasts of mankind ; he tended them with af- 
fectionate assiduity, washed their feet, and sometimes healed 
them miraculously with a kiss. This strange and fervent pi- 
ety, joined to his touching eloquence and poetic fancy, soon 
won for St. Francis a throng of followers, who imitated his 
humility and took the vow of perpetual poverty. He now re- 
solved to Gonvert the world ; but he must first gain the sanc- 
tion of the Pope. Innocent III. was walking on the terrace 
of the splendid Lateran when a mendicant of mean appear- 
ance presented himself, and proposed to convert mankind 
through poverty and humility. It was St. Francis. The Pope 
at first dismissed him with contempt ; but a vision warned him 
not to neglect the pious appeal. The Order of St. Francis was 
founded, and countless hosts soon took the vow of chastity, 
poverty, and obedience. The Franciscans were the gentlest 
of mankind : they lived on alms. If stricken on one cheek, 
they offered the other ; if robbed of a part of their dress, they 
gave the whole. Love was to be the binding element of the 
brotherhood ; and the sweet effluence of universal charity, the 
poetic dream of the gentle Francis, was to be spread over all 
mankind. 

How rapidly the Franciscans and Dominicans declined from 
the rigid purity of their founders need scarcely be told. In a 
few years their monasteries grew splendid, their possessions 
were vast, their vows of poverty and purity were neglected or 
forgotten, and the two orders, filled with emulation and spirit- 
ual pride, contended with each other for the control of Chris- 
tendom. Innocent, meantime, died in 1216, in the full strength 
of manhood, yet having accomplished every object for which 
his towering spirit had labored so unceasingly. He had crush- 
ed and mortified the pride of every European monarch, had 
exalted the Church upon the wreck of nations, had seeming- 
ly extirpated heresy, and was become that Universal Bishop 
which, to the modest Gregory the Great, had seemed the sym- 
bol of Antichrist and the invention of Satanic pride. 

The next phase in which the papacy exhibits itself is the 
natural result of the possession of absolute temporal and spir- 



52 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

itual power; the next representative Pope is a Borgia. In 
no other place than Rome conld a Borgia have arisen ; in no 
other position than that of Pope could so frightful a monster 
have maintained his power. Alexander VI., or Roderic Bor- 
gia, a Spaniard of noble family and nephew to Pope Calixtus 
III., was early brought to Pome by his uncle, and made a 
cardinal in spite of his vices and his love of ease. He became 
Pope in 1492 by the grossest simony. Alexander's only ob- 
ject was the gratification of his own desires and the exaltation 
of his natural children. Of these, whom he called his neph- 
ews, there were five — one son being Caesar Borgia, and one 
daughter the infamous Lucrezia.Q Alexander is represented 
to have been a poisoner, a robber, a hypocrite, a treacherous 
friend. His children in all these traits of wickedness sur* 
passed their father. Caesar Borgia, beautiful in person, and 
so strong that in a bull-fight he struck off the head of the ani- 
mal at a single blow — a majestic monster ruled by unbridled 
passions and stained with blood — now governed Pome and his 
father by the terror of his crimes. Every night, in the streets 
of the city, were found the corpses of persons whom he had 
murdered either for their money or for revenge ; yet no one 
dared to name the assassin. Those whom he could not reach 
by violence he took off by poison. His first victim was his 
own elder brother, Francis, Duke of Gandia, whom Alexander 
loved most of all his children, and whose rapid rise in wealth 
and station excited the hatred of the fearful Caesar. Francis 
had just been appointed Duke of Benevento ; and before he 
set out for Naples there was a family party of the Borgias 
one evening at the papal palace, where no doubt a strange 
kind of mirth and hilarity prevailed. The two brothers left 
together, and parted with a pleasant farewell, Caesar having 
meantime provided four assassins to waylay his victim that 
very night. The next morning the duke was missing; sev- 

(*) Ranke, Popes, p. 30, describes the horrible family. Gregorovius (Lu- 
crezia Borgia), in his recent work, would soften the terrible lineaments of 
Lucrezia's historical renown. But even at Ferrara Mr. Symouds (Renais- 
sance) indicates that she must have lived in an atmosphere of fearful 
deeds. 



THE BORGIAS. 53 

eral days passed, but he did not return. It was believed that 
he was murdered ; and Alexander, full of grief, ordered the 
Tiber to be dragged for the body of his favorite child. An 
enemy, he thought, had made away with him. He little sus- 
pected who that enemy was. At length a Sclavonian water- 
man came to the palace with a startling story. He said that 
on the night when the prince disappeared, while he was watch- 
ing some timber on the river, he saw two men approach the 
bank, and look cautiously around to see if they were observed. 
Seeing no one, they made a signal to two others, one of whom 
was on horseback, and who carried a dead body swung care- 
lessly across his horse. He advanced to the river, flung the 
corpse far into the water, and then rode away. Upon being 
asked why he had not mentioned this before, the waterman re- 
plied that it was a common occurrence, and that he had seen 
more than a hundred bodies thrown into the Tiber in a simi- 
lar manner. The search was now renewed, and the body of 
the ill-fated Francis was found pierced by nine mortal wounds. 
Alexander buried his son with great pomp, and offered large 
rewards for the discovery of his murderers. At last the terri- 
ble secret was revealed to him ; he hid himself in his palace, 
refused food, and abandoned himself to grief. Here he was 
visited by the mother of his children, who still lived at Rome. 
What passed at their interview was never known ; but all in- 
quiry into the murder ceased, and Alexander was soon again 
immersed in his pleasures and his ambitious designs. 

Caesar Borgia now ruled unrestrained, and preyed upon the 
Romans like some fabulous monster of Greek mythology. 
He would suffer no rival to live, and he made no secret of his 
murderous designs. His brother-in-law was stabbed by his 
orders on the steps of the palace. The wounded man was 
nursed by his wife and his sister, the latter preparing his food 
lest he might be carried off by poison, while the Pope set a 
guard around the house to protect his son-in-law from his son. 
Caesar laughed at these precautions. "What can not be done 
in the noonday," he said, " may be brought about in the even- 
ing." He broke into the chamber of his brother-in-law, drove 
out the wife and sister, and had him strangled by the common 



54 THE BISHOPS OF ROME. 

executioner. He stabbed his father's favorite, Perotto, while 
he clung to his patron for protection, and the blood of the vic- 
tim flowed over the face and robes of the Pope. Lucrezia 
Borgia rivaled, or surpassed, the crimes of her brother ; while 
Alexander himself performed the holy rites of the Church 
with singular exactness, and in his leisure moments poisoned 
wealthy cardinals and seized upon their estates. He is said 
to have been singularly engaging in his manners, and most 
agreeable in the society of those whom he had resolved to de- 
stroy. At length, Alexander perished by his own arts. He 
gave a grand entertainment, at which one or more wealthy 
cardinals were invited for the purpose of being poisoned, and 
Caesar Borgia was to provide the means. He sent several 
flasks of poisoned wine to the table, with strict orders not to 
use them except by his directions. Alexander came early to 
the banquet, heated with exercise, and called for some refresh- 
ment ; the servants brought him the poisoned wine, supposing 
it to be of rare excellence ; he drank of it freely, and was 
soon in the pangs of death. His blackened body was buried 
with all the pomp of the Roman ritual. 

Scarcely is the story of the Borgias to be believed : such a 
father, such children, have never been known before or since. 
Yet the accurate historians of Italy, and the careful Ranke, 
unite in the general outline of their crimes. On no other 
throne than the temporal empire of Rome has sat such a crim- 
inal as Alexander ; in no other city than Rome could a Csesar 
Borgia have pursued his horrible career ; in none other was 
a Lucrezia Borgia ever known. The Pope was the absolute 
master of the lives and fortunes of his subjects ; he was also 
the absolute master of their souls ; and the union of these two 
despotisms produced at Rome a form of human wickedness 
which romance has never imagined, and which history shud- 
ders to describe. 

We may pause at this era in our review of the represent- 
ative bishops of Rome, since the Reformation was soon to 
throw a softening and refining light upon the progress of the 
papacy. There were to be no more Borgias, no second Inno- 
cent ; the fresh blasts from the North were to purify in some 



THE MODERN POPES. 55 

measure the malarious atmosphere of the Holy City.Q Yet 
I trust this brief series of pictures of the early bishops will 
not have been without interest to the candid reader, and he 
will observe that it was only as the Roman Church aban- 
doned the primeval laws of gentleness, humility, and humani- 
ty that it ceased to be the benefactor of the barbarous races it 
had subdued. As the splendid panorama passes before us, and 
we survey the meek and holy Stephen perishing a sainted 
martyr in the Catacombs ; the modest Gregory, the first sing- 
ing-master of Europe, soothing the savage world to obedience 
and order by the sweet influence of his holy songs ; the cun- 
ning Zacharias winning a temporal crown from the grateful 
Frank; Hildebrand rising in haughty intellectual pre-emi- 
nence above kings and princes ; Innocent III. trampling upon 
the rights of nations, and lifting over Europe his persecuting 
arm, red with the guiltless blood of the troubadours and the 
Albigenses ; or a Borgia, the incarnation of sin — we shall have 
little difficulty in discovering why it is that the bishops of 
Rome have faded into a magnificent pageant before the rise 
of a purer knowledge, and why it is that the Pope of to-day, 
surrounded by the most splendid of earthly rituals, and pro- 
nouncing from the Vatican the anathemas of the Middle 
Ages, is heard with mingled pity and derision by the vigor- 
ous intellect of the nations over which his predecessors once 
held an undisputed sway. 

(*) Yet the inventors of the Roman Inquisition may possibly not deserve 
even this doubtful praise. From 1540 to 1700, the popes were possibly 
more dangerous to mankind than many Borgias. 



LEO AND LUTHER. 

There was joy at Rome in the year 1513, for Pope Julius 
II. was dead. It was no unusual thing, indeed, for the Ro- 
mans to rejoice at the death of a Pope. If there was any one 
the people of the Holy City contemned and hated more than 
all other men, it ^as usually their spiritual father, whose bless- 
ings they so devoutly received ; and next to him his countless 
officials, who preyed upon their fellow-citizens as tax-gather- 
ers, notaries, and a long gradation of dignities. But upon Ju- 
lius, the withered and palsied old man, the rage of the people 
had turned with unprecedented vigor. (*) He had been a light- 
ing Pope. His feeble frame had been torn by unsated and in- 
satiable passions that would have become a Caesar or an Alex- 
ander, but which seemed almost demoniac in this terrible old 
man. His ambition had been the curse of Rome, of Italy, of 
Europe ; he had set nations at enmity in the hope of enlarging 
his temporal power ; he had made insincere leagues and trea- 
ties in order to escape the punishment of his crimes ; his plight- 
ed faith was held a mockery in all the European courts ; his 
fits of rage and impotent malice made him the laughing-stock 
of kings and princes; and the cost of his feeble wars and 
faithless alliances had left Rome the pauper city of Europe. 

And now Julius was dead. The certainty that his fierce 
spirit was fled forever had been tested by all the suspicious 
forms of the Roman Church. The Cardinal Camerlengo 
stood before the door of the Pope's chamber, struck it with a 
gilt mallet, and called Julius by name. Receiving no answer, 



(*) He was in the habit of using his pastoral staff to punish dull bishops 
— probably its original design. De La Chatre, Hist, des Papes : " Desqne 
Jules II. eut termine" sou execrable vie." Roscoe and Ranke are more fa- 
vorable to Julius. 



A CONCLAVE. 57 

he entered the room, tapped the corpse on the head with a 
mallet of silver, and then, falling npon his knees before the 
lifeless body, proclaimed the death of the Pope.Q Next the 
tolling of the great bell in the Capitol, which was sonnded 
upon these solemn occasions alone, announced to Rome and 
to the Church that the Holy Father was no more. Its heavy 
note was the signal for a reign of universal license and mis- 
rule. Ten days are always allowed to pass between the death 
of a Pope and the meeting of the conclave of cardinals for the 
election of his successor; and during that period it was long 
an established custom that Rome should be abandoned to riot, 
bloodshed, pillage, and every species of crime. The very 
chamber of the dead Pope was entered and sacked. The city 
wore the appearance of a civil war. The papal soldiery, ill 
paid and half fed, roamed through the streets robbing, mur- 
dering, and committing a thousand outrages unrestrained. 
Palaces were plundered, houses sacked, quiet citizens were 
robbed, murdered, and their bodies left in the streets or thrown 
into the Tiber. " Not a day passed," wrote Gigli, an observer 
of one of these dreadful saturnalia, " without brawls, murders, 
and waylayings." At length the nobles fortified and garri- 
soned their palaces, barricades were drawn across the principal 
streets, and only the miserable shop-keepers and tradesmen 
were left exposed to the outrages of the papal banditti. ( 2 ) 

Meantime the holy conclave of cardinals was summoned to 
meet for the election of a successor to St. Peter. The whole 
of the first-floor of the Vatican, an immense range of apart- 
ments, now no longer used for electoral purposes, was pre- 
pared for the important occasion. Within its ample limits a 
booth or cell was provided for each cardinal, where he lived 
during the sitting of the assembly separate from his fellows. 
The booths were distributed by a raffle. A certain number 
of attendants, called conclavists, were allowed to the cardi- 



(*) I have assumed that all the usual ceremonies were employed at the 
death of Julius. 

( 2 ) Corineniu, Hist. Popes, Leo X. See North British Review, Decemher ; 
1866, art. Conclaves. 



58 LEO AND LUTHER. 

nals, who remained shut up with them during the election, 
and whose privilege it was to plunder the cell of the newly 
chosen Pope the moment the choice was announced.Q 

Before the final closing of the assembly to the world the 
Vatican presented a gay and splendid scene. All the great 
and noble of Rome came to visit the cardinals in their cells. 
Princes and magnates, foreign embassadors and political en- 
voys from the various Catholic powders, aspiring confessors 
and diplomatic priests, hurried from cell to cell on that impor- 
tant afternoon, whispering bribes, flatteries, or threats into 
each sacred ear ; electioneering with all the ardor of a village 
politician for their favorite candidate, or the choice of their 
mighty courts at home ; or indicating in distinct menace those 
persons whom Austria, France, and Spain would never suffer 
to wear the triple crown. At three hours after sunset a bell 
was heard ringing loudly, and the master of ceremonies com- 
ing forward called out, Extra omnes. The vast and busy 
throng was slowly and reluctantly dispersed. The last per- 
suasion was offered, the last bribe promised, the last threat of 
haughty Bourbons or Hapsburgs whispered, and the gorgeous 
assembly of electioneering princes and embassadors melted 
away along the dusky streets of Pome. 

The cardinals were now shut up in close confinement. ( 2 ) 
All the windows and doors of the lower floors of the Yatican 
had been walled up except the door at the head of the prin- 
cipal staircase, which was secured by bolts and bars. By the 
side of this entrance were placed turning-boxes like those used 
in convents or nunneries, through which alone the imprisoned 
cardinals were allowed to hold any intercourse with the outer 
world ; while whatever passed through these was carefully in- 
spected by officers both within and without. Guards of sol- 
diers were posted around the palace to insure the isolation of 
the holy prisoners, and the anathema of the Church was de- 
nounced against any cardinal or conclavist who should reveal 
the secrets of the inspired assembly. To insure a speedy de- 

(*) The physician of the Cardinal de' Medici was admitted to attend him. 
( 2 ) Mosheim, ii., p. 347. 



THE PAPAL ELECTORS. 59 

cision, however, a somewhat carnal device had been lighted 
npon. It was ordered that if after three days the cardinals 
should have made no choice, they should each be confined to 
a single dish at every meal; if they remained obstinate for 
Hve clays longer, they must be restricted in their diet to bread, 
wine, and water alone as long as the session continued. 

All the cumbrous forms employed at a papal election have 
been gradually introduced by the Popes themselves, and were 
designed to strengthen and complete the supremacy of the 
Chief Pontiff. Q In the early ages of the Chmch, the Popes 
were elected by the assembled clergy and people of Pome, 
and the sacred privilege was cherished by the turbulent Ro- 
mans as their most valued possession. But the pontiffs, as 
they advanced in earthly power and grandeur, began to dis- 
dain or dread the tumultuous throng from whence they de- 
rived their holy office ; and Nicholas II., in 1059, under the 
guidance of the haughty Hildebrand, snatched the election of 
the Popes from the people, and placed it in the hands of the 
cardinals alone. Xone but the college of cardinals from that 
time have had any vote in the choice. But France, Austria, 
and Spain are each allowed to veto the election of some single 
cardinal. Custom, too, has sanctioned that none but a cardi- 
nal shall be chosen, and the bull of Nicholas II. promises or 
suggests that the successful candidate shall come from the 
bosom of the Poman prelacy. ( 2 ) Pope Alexander III. added 
the provision that a vote of two-thirds of the college should 
be necessary to a choice; while Gregory X., elected in 1271, 
called together a General Council at Lyons (127-1), where 
many abuses of the past were reformed, and the ceremonial 
of election arranged nearly in the form in which it now exists. 
Each cardinal has a single vote, and his right of suffrage can 
scarcely be taken from him even by the Pope himself. It is 
looked upon as a privilege almost immutable. Cardinals cov- 
ered with crimes and shut up in St. Angelo have been taken 



C 1 ) See Stendhal, Promenades dans Konie, for a late conclave, pp. 176, 177. 
( 2 ) Baronius, Ann. Ecc, ii., p. 314: "De ipsius Ecclesise greinio." The 
language is very cautious. 



60 LEO AND LUTHER. 

from their prison to the sacred college, and then, when they 
had voted, were sent back to their dungeon. Cardinals con- 
victed of poisoning or attempts to murder have regained, on 
the death of a Pope, their official privilege of aiding in the 
election of a successor to St. Peter. But Cardinal Rohan was 
degraded from all his offices for his share in the affair of the 
Diamond Necklace; and during the French Revolution two 
cardinals renounced their sacred dignity, and were held to 
have lost even their right of voting. Yet the cardinals, the 
princes of the Roman Church, form an immutable hierarchy, 
independent, in some respects, of the Chief Pontiff himself. 
From their body the new Pope must be chosen ; to them, on 
the death of a Pope, falls the selection of his successor ; and 
their elevated position as the creators of the vicegerent of 
Heaven would seem naturally to require that they should dis- 
play in the highest degree the purest traits of Christian virtue. 
In the sacred college that assembled on the death of Julius 
II. were gathered a band of men corrupted by power, avari- 
cious, venal, unscrupulous, and capable of every crime. One 
had been engaged in the plot for the assassination of Lorenzo 
de' Medici. One was a poisoner and a murderer of old stand- 
ing. Most of them had been educated in the horrible school 
of the Borgias.Q Scarcely one that was not a shame and hor- 
ror to the eyes of pious men ; scarcely one that was not ready 
with the dagger and the bowl. Ambitious of power, eager 
for the plunder of the Church, the conclave resolved to choose 
a Pope who would give them little trouble, whom they could 
mold and intimidate, and from whom they could extract at 
will the largest revenues and the richest benefices.( 2 ) Such a 
man seemed the Cardinal de' Medici, the second son of Lo- 
renzo the Magnificent, of Florence. He was the most polish- 
ed and elegant prelate of his time. His disposition was mild 
and even, his person graceful and imposing, his generosity 
unbounded, and his love for letters and his familiarity with 



( x ) Most of them were afterward engaged in a plot to poison Leo. X. 
( 2 ) It was said in the conclave that the Cardinal de' Medici could not 
live a month. 



GIOVANNI DE'' MEDICI. 61 

literary men had thrown around him an intellectual charm 
which was felt even by the coarsest of his contemporaries. 
But, above all, it was believed in the sacred college that his 
nature was so soft and complying that he would readily yield 
up the government of the Church to the bolder spirits around 
him. Yet the contest within the walls of the Vatican lasted 
for seven days,Q during all which time the bland Cardinal 
de' Medici, with the usual policy of his race, was engaged in 
secretly or openly promoting his own election. He softened 
and subdued his enemies by flatteries and promises ; he was 
seen talking in a friendly and confidential way with Cardinal 
San Giorgio, the assassin of his uncle ; he won Soderini, the 
persecutor of his race, by ample expectations ; all the cardinals 
connected with royal families were especially favorable to the 
descendant of a line of princely money-lenders ; the holy col- 
lege yielded to the claim of the graceful Medici, and a major- 
ity of ballots inscribed with his name were found in the sacred 
chalice. Then a window in the Vatican was broken open, and 
Leo X. proclaimed Pope to the assembled people of Rome. 
He was placed in the pontifical chair and borne to St. Peter's, 
followed by the rejoicing populace, the excited clergy, the 
holy conclave; and as the procession passed on its way can- 
non were discharged, the populace applauded, and the long 
train of ecclesiastics, transported by a sudden fervor, broke 
out into a solemn strain of praise and glory to the Most High. 
Giovanni de' Medici was the descendant of that great mer- 
cantile family at Florence which had astonished Europe by its 
commercial grandeur and elegant taste, and whose founders 
had learned complaisance and democracy in the tranquil pur- 
suits of trade.( 2 ) Their fortunes had been built upon indus- 
try, probity, politeness, and a careful attention to business. 
They had long practiced the virtues of honor and good faith 
when their feudal neighbors had been distinguished only by 
utter insincerity. The Medici had increased their wealth 
from father to son until they became the richest bankers in 

( 1 ) The votes were taken twice a day, and the ballots burned. Stend- 
hal, p. 177. 

( 2 ) Vita Leonis Decimi, a Paulo Jovio, i. Eoscoe, Leo X. 



62 LEO AND LUTREB. 

Europe, and saw the mightiest kings, and a throng of princes, 
priests, and warriors, suppliants at their counters for loans and 
benefits, which sometimes they never intended to repay. At 
length Lorenzo, the father of Leo X., retired from business to 
give himself to schemes of ambition, and to guide the affairs 
of Italy. His immense wealth, pleasing manners, prudence, 
and good sense made him the most eminent of all the Ital- 
ians : nnhappily Lorenzo sunk from the dignity of an honest 
trader to share in the ambitious diplomacy of his age, and lost 
his virtue in his effort to become great. Giovanni was his fa- 
vorite son — the only one that had any ability; and Lorenzo 
had resolved, almost from his birth, that he should wear the 
triple crown. 

At seven years of age Giovanni was made an abbot. His 
childish head was shaven with the monkish tonsure. He was 
addressed as Messire, was saluted with reverence as one of the 
eminent dignitaries of the Church, and was supposed to con- 
trol the spiritual concerns of various rich benefices. The 
child-abbot soon showed an excellent intellect, and, under the 
care of Politian, became learned in the rising literature of the 
day. All that the immense wealth and influence of his father 
could give him lay at his command. He was educated in the 
magnificent palace of the Medici which Cosmo had complain- 
ed was too large for so small a family, shared in those lavish 
entertainments of which Lorenzo was so fond, was familiar 
with the wits, the poets, the painters of that gifted age, and 
learned the graceful skepticism that was fashionable at his 
father's court. When Giovanni was thirteen,^) Lorenzo re- 
solved to raise him to the highest dignity in the Church be- 
low that of the Supreme Pontiff. He begged the Pope, with 
prayers that seem now strangely humiliating, to make his son 
a cardinal. He enlisted in his favor all whom he could influ- 
ence at the papal court. " It will raise me from death to life," 
he cried, when the Pope seemed to hesitate. The boon was 
at last obtained, and the boy of fourteen, the child of wealth 
and luxurious ease, with no effort of his own, became one of 

(*) " Vix turn tertiuindecinium excedentem aDnum." P. Jovius, p. 15. 



LUTHER'S CHILDHOOD. 63 

the chief priests of Christendom. The Pope, however, with 
some show of propriety, required that the investiture should 
not take place in three years, during which time the young 
Medici was to give his attention to study. Politian still di- 
rected his studies. Giovanni was grave, graceful, formal, am- 
bitious; and at seventeen, in the year 1492, so fatal to the 
glory of his family, he took his place in the sacred college at 
Rome, -and was received in the Holy City with a general re- 
spect that seemed not unworthy of its future master. 

Meanwhile, far away in a little hamlet of Germany, a beg- 
gar-child was singing mendicant songs from door to door, and 
living upon the insufficient alms which he won from the com- 
passion of the charitable. It was a delicate and feeble boy, to 
whom childhood offered no joys, whose youth was a perpetual 
woe. Luther was a peasant's son, and all his ancestors had 
been peasants.^) His father was a miner in the heart of the 
Thuringian forest. The manners of the peasants were harsh 
and cruel : Luther's parents drove him out to beg ; his moth- 
er sometimes scourged him till the blood came for a trivial 
offense ; his father punished him so severely and so often that 
the child fled from his presence in terror ; and his little voice, 
as he chanted his mendicant hymns, must often have been 
drowned in tears. Yet so sweet aud tender was the heart of 
the great reformer that he ever retained the most sincere love 
and reverence for the parents whom poverty and their own 
sufferings had made so severe. He was ever a fond and duti- 
ful son. He wept bitterly, like Mohammed, over his mothers 
grave. He was proud to relate that his father won a hard 
and scanty living in the mines of Mansfeld, and that his 
mother carried wood from the forest on her back to their 
peasant home ; and when he came to stand before Europe the 
adversary of the elegant Leo, and the companion of kings and 
princes, he was never weary of modestly boasting that he was 
a peasant's son.Q 



( a ) Tischreden, p. 581. Kanke, Keformation in Germany, i., p. 136. 
( 2 ) Michelet, Me'inoires de Luther, i. The best account of Luther is that 
of Walch, Nachricht von D. Martin Luther, vol. xxiv., Sainintliche Werke. 



64 LEO AND LUTHER. 

Luther was eight years younger than the Cardinal de' Me- 
dici. He begged his education at Eisenach, a small German 
town, until he was thirteen, and was then maintained by a 
charitable relative. Afterward his father, who had thriven 
by industry and toil, was enabled to send his. son to the uni- 
versity at Erfurth, and hoped to make him a lawyer. Q But 
now that mighty intellect, which was destined to spread its 
banyan -like branches over Europe and mankind, began to 
flourish with native vigor. Luther's rare versatility embraced 
every form of mental accomplishment. He loved music with 
intense devotion ; his sensitive frame responded to the slight- 
est touch of instrumental sounds; he believed that demons 
fled at the sound of his flute ; and when he had fallen into 
one of his peculiar trances in his cell, his fellow-monks knew 
that music was the surest medicament to bring him back to 
consciousness and activity. ( 2 ) He was a poet, and his relig- 
ious impulses often expressed themselves in sacred songs — 
rude, bold, and powerful — that have formed the germ and 
model of those of many lands. His love for pure literature 
was in no degree inferior to that of his elegant rival, Leo X. ; 
he studied day and night the few works of classic or mediae- 
val writers that were then accessible to the humble scholar or 
the penniless monk ; and his craving mind was never sated in 
its ceaseless appetite for knowledge. Yet his disposition was 
never saturnine or desponding ; as a student he was often 
gay, joyous, and fond of cheerful company ; his tuneful voice 
was no doubt often heard at convivial meetings at Erfurth ; 
his broad and ready wit must have kept many a table in a 
roar; and his loving heart seems to have gathered around 
him many friends. So varied were his tastes, so vigorous his 
powers, that, in whatever path his intellect had been directed, 
he must have risen high above his fellow-men. He might 
have shone as a lawyer and a famous statesman; he might 
have been the Homer of Germany, or the author of a new 
Nibelungenlied ; his classic taste might easily have been 

(*) An din, Histoire de Martin Lnther, i. Ranke, Reformation, i., p. 318. 
( 2 ) Ranke, i., p. 321. 



LUTHER A MONK. 65 

turned to the revival of letters ; his musical powers have pro- 
duced an earlier Mozart ; or his rare and boundless originality 
have been expended in satiric or tragic pictures of that world 
around him of whose folly and dullness he had so clear a con- 
ception. 

One day Luther was walking through the fields with one of 
his young companions from his father's home in the forest to 
Erfurth.Q It was July, and suddenly a fierce storm gather- 
ed over the bright sky ; the mountains around were hidden in 
gloom ; the lightning leaped from cloud to cloud ; all nature 
trembled; when a sharp bolt from heaven struck Luther's 
companion dead at his side, and left him for a time senseless 
beside him. He wandered home on his solitary way, oppress- 
ed with an intolerable dread ; he believed that he had heard 
the voice of Heaven calling him to repent ; he vowed that he 
would give his whole future life to asceticism and monastic 
gloom. The next evening, with the impulsive inconstancy of 
youth, he passed with his young companions in the pleasures 
of music, wine, and song, anxious perhaps to try if he could 
drown in the joys of the world the pains of a wounded spirit. 
But the next day he hastened to the convent of the Augus- 
tines at Erfurth, and took the irrevocable vow.( 2 ) He re- 
solved by the practice of the severest austerity to escape the 
pains of purgatory. He was the most faithful of ascetics. 
All his great powers, all the joyousness of his youthful spir- 
it, all the abundant growth of his fertile intellect, were shut 
up in a narrow cell and wasted in the closest observance of 
monkish rites. And the result was sufficiently appalling. 
He was weighed down by an ever-increasing consciousness 
of sin. Despair and death seemed his only portion. His life 
was agony, and sometimes he would sink down in his cell in a 
deep swoon, from which he could only be aroused by the gen- 
tle touch of a stringed instrument.^) 

C) Ranke, i., p. 318, somewhat varies the common story. See Michelet, 
i., p. 5. 

( 2 ) Ranke, i., p. 319. Walch, xxiv., p. 76, gives the various accounts of 
Luther's conversion. 

( 3 ) Ranke, i., p. 321. Michelet, i., p. 10. 

5 



66 LEO AND LUTHER. 

While Luther was thus passing through the rude ordeal of 
his painful youth, his companion spirit, the elegant Cardinal 
de' Medici, had glided gracefully onward in a career of unsul- 
lied prosperity.^) His sins had never given him any trouble. 
His conscience was soothed and satisfied by the united ap- 
plause of all his associates. The learned Politian, a polished 
pagan, wrote in the most graceful periods of his piety and de- 
corum. His father, Lorenzo, had never been weary of spread- 
ing the report of his early fitness for the highest station in the 
Church. He was looked upon as an especial ornament to the 
sacred college of cardinals; and the cardinal himself seems 
never to have doubted his own piety, or to have shrunk from 
the responsibility of holding in his well-trained hands the des- 
tiny of the Christian world. For him purgatory had no ter- 
rors ; the future world was a fair and faint mirage over which 
he aspired to spread his sceptre in order to rebuild St. Peter's 
or to immortalize his reign ; but beyond that he seems scarce- 
ly to have looked within its veil. That future upon which 
Luther gazed with wild, inquiring eyes, for Leo seemed scarce- 
ly to exist. He was more anxious to know, with Cicero, what 
men would be saying of him six hundred years from now ; or 
more engaged in speculating upon his own prospect of filling 
with grace and dignity the chair of St. Peter. 

At eighteen the young cardinal seems almost to have at- 
tained the maturity of his physical and mental powers. He 
was tall, handsome, graceful, intellectual. His complexion 
was fair and florid, his countenance cheerful and benignant. 
He was famed for the magnificence of his entertainments, his 
love of display, his unbounded extravagance, his open gener- 
osity. He wasted his father's wealth, as afterward his own, 
in feasts, processions, and deeds of real benevolence. He was 
the spendthrift son of an opulent parent; he became the 
wasteful master of the resources of the Church. Like Luther, 
he was passionately fond of music. He played and sung him- 
self ; he studied his art with care ; and his leisure hours were 
seldom without musical employment. Like Luther, too, he 

( J ) P. Jovius ; p. 15. 



LEO IN MISFORTUNE. 67 

loved letters with a strange and surpassing regard. Reading 
was his chief pleasure, and he seldom sat down to table with- 
out having some poem or history before him, or without 
lengthening his repast by reading aloud fine passages to his 
literary friends. He had some imperfect sense of the real 
power of the intellect, and the man of letters was always to 
Leo a kind of deity whom he was glad to worship or to ap- 
proach. But his own productions are never above medioc- 
rity, and the real genius that glowed in the breast of Luther 
was an inscrutable mystery to the ambitious Pope. 

Calamity in a magnificent form at length came even to the 
prosperous cardinal. In 1492 his father Lorenzo died, and 
two years afterward the Medici were driven out of Florence. 
Savonarola,^) the Luther of Italy, the gifted monk whose 
fierce eloquence had transformed the skeptical Florentines 
from pagan indifference to puritanic austerity,( 2 ) who had 
preached freedom and democracy, who had inveighed against 
the vices of the clergy and the despotism of Eome, and whose 
fatal and unmerited doom must have been ever before the 
mind of his German successor, became for a time the master 
of his country. Florence was once more a republic, the cen- 
tre of religious reform. The theatres were closed, the spec- 
tacles deserted, and the churches were filled with immense 
throngs of citizens who were never weary of listening to the 
stern rebukes of the inspired monk. But in 1494 Savonaro- 
la fell before the intrigues of his enemy, Alexander VI., the 
Borgia ; he was hanged, his body burned, and his ashes cast 
into the Arno.( 3 ) The Church triumphed in the destruction 
of its saintly victim; but the Medici were exiles from their 
native city for eighteen years, and were only restored in 1512, 
by the favor of Julius II. and the arms of the Spaniards. 
During this long period of disaster the cardinal lived in 
great magnificence, and wasted much of his fortune. Pover- 
ty even threatened him who had never known any thing but 

C) Jovius admits the eloquence of Savonarola. 

( 2 ) "Ut nihil sine ejus viri consilio recte geri posse videretur." P. Jo- 
vius, p. 21. 

C) "In area curias fcedissimo supplicio concrematus." P. Jovius, p. 24. 



68 LEO AND LUTHEB. 

boundless Wealth. In the fearful reign at Rome of Alexan- 
der VI. and Csesar Borgia, he wandered over Europe, visited 
Maximilian in Germany, and his son Philip in the Low Coun- 
tries ; passed over France, paused a while at Marseilles, and 
then returned to Italy.Q Here, at the town of Savona, met 
at table three exiles, each of whom was destined to wear the 
papal crown ; Povere, afterward Julius II. ; the Cardinal de' 
Medici, Leo X. ; and Giuliano de' Medici, afterward Clement 
VII. When Julius was made Pope, the Cardinal de' Medici 
returned to Pome, and became the chosen adviser of that 
pontiff. He shared in the various unsuccessful attempts of 
his family to regain their control over Florence, was often in 
command of the papal armies, and shone in the camp as 
well as the court ; saw in 1512 the restoration of the Medici 
to Florence; and the next year, on the death of his friend 
Julius II., was enthroned as Pope at Pome — the magnificent 
LeoX. 

In the close of the reign of Julius, Luther visited Pome. 
The poor monk, worn with penances and mental toil, was sent 
upon some business connected with his convent to the papal 
court.( 2 ) He crossed the Alps full of faith and stirred by a 
strong excitement. He was about to enter that classic land 
with whose poets and historians he had long been familiar: 
he was to tread the sacred soil of Virgil, Cicero, and Livy. 
But, more than this, he saw before him, rising in dim majesty, 
the Holy City of that Church from whose faith he had never 
yet ventured to depart, whose supreme head was still to him 
almost the representative of Deity, and whose princes and 
dignitaries he had ever invested with an apostolic purity and 
grace. Pome, hallowed by the sufferings of the martyrs, fill- 
ed with relics, and redolent with the piety of ages, the untu- 
tored monk still supposed a scene of heavenly rest. " Hail, 
holy Pome !"■ he exclaimed, as its distant towers first met his 
eyes. His poetic dream was soon dispelled. Scarcely had he 
entered Italy when he was shocked and terrified by the luxu- 
ry and license of the convents, and the open depravity of the 

C) P. Jovius, p. 27. ( 2 ) Walch, xxiv. ; p. 102 et seq. 



LEO X. AS POPE. 69 

priesthood. He fell sick with sorrow and shame. He com- 
plained that the very air of Italy seemed deadly and pestilen- 
tial. Bnt he wandered on, feeble and sad, until he reached 
the Holy City, and there, amidst the mockery of his fellow- 
monks and the blasphemies of the impions clergy, performed 
with honest superstition the minnte ceremonial of the Church. 
Of all the pilgrims to that desecrated shrine none was so de- 
vout as Luther. He was determined, he said, to escape the 
pains of purgatory, and win a plenary indulgence : he dragged 
his frail form on his knees up the painful ascent of the Holy 
Stairs, while ever in his ears resounded the cry, " The just 
shall live by faith," He heard with horror that the head 
of the Church was a monster stained with vice; that the 
cardinals were worse than their master; the priests, mock- 
ing unbelievers ; and fled, heart-broken, back to his German 
cell. 

On the 11th of April, 1513, Leo X. opened his splendid 
reign by the usual procession to the Lateran, but the magnifi- 
cence of his pageant was such as had never been seen at Rome 
since the fall of the Western Empire. It was the most im- 
posing and the last of the triumphs of the undivided Church. 
The Supreme Pontiff, clothed in rich robes glittering with 
rubies and diamonds, crowned with a tiara of precious stones 
of priceless value, and dazzling all eyes by the lustre of his 
decorations, rode on an Arab steed at the head of an assem- 
bled throng of cardinals, embassadors, and princes. The cler- 
gy, the people of Rome, and a long array of soldiers in shin- 
ing armor, followed in his train. Before him, far away, the 
streets were spread with rich tapestry, spanned by numerous 
triumphal arches of rare beauty, and adorned on every side 
by countless statues and works of art. Young girls and chil- 
dren, clothed in white, cast flowers or palms before him as he 
passed. A general joy seemed to fill the Holy City ; the sa- 
cred rites were performed at the Lateran with a just deco- 
rum ; and in the evening of the auspicious day Leo entertain- 
ed his friends at a banquet in the Vatican, whose luxury and 
extravagance are said to have rivaled the pagan splendors of 
Apicius or Lucullus. 



70 LEO AND LUTHER. 

And now began the Golden Age of Leo X.Q The descend- 
ant of the Medici ruled over an undivided Christendom. But 
lately his spiritual empire had been enlarged by the discov- 
eries of Columbus and Gama, and the conquests of the Span- 
iards and Portuguese. India and America lay at the feet of 
the new Pope. In Europe his authority was greater than 
that of any of his predecessors. The Emperor of Germany, 
the kings of England, France, and Portugal, became at length 
his obedient vassals. Henry, Charles, and Francis looked to 
the accomplished Leo for counsel and example, and paid sin- 
cere deference to the court of Eome. He was the master 
spirit of the politics of his age ; and the three brilliant young 
monarchs, whose talents seemed only directed to the ruin of 
Europe and of mankind, were held in check by the careful 
policy of the acute Italian. With the clergy Leo was still 
more successful. He was the idol of the priests and bishops 
of the Continent and of England. In Germany, his name 
stood high as a man of probity and dignity; Luther avowed 
his respect for the pontiffs character ; in England, Wolsey led 
the Church to his support. A common delusion seems to 
have prevailed that Leo was either sincerely pious or singu- 
larly discreet. The people, too, so far as they were familiar 
with the pontiff's name, repeated it with respect. Compared 
with the passionate, licentious Julius, or the monster Alexan- 
der, he seemed of saintly purity ; while the scholars of every 
land united in spreading the fame of that benevolent poten- 
tate whose bounty had been felt by the humblest of their or- 
der, as well as the most renowned. 

The age of Leo X. was golden with the glories of art.( 2 ) 
He was the most bountiful and unwearied friend of intellect 
the world has ever seen. His most sincere impulse was the 
homage he paid to every form of genius. Ambitious stu- 
dents and impoverished scholars hastened to Pome with their 
imperfect poems and half -finished treatises, submitted them to 
the kindly critic, were received with praise and just congratu- 

(') Joyius: ^Auream setatem post multa specula condidisse." 
C) Jovius, p. 109, 



THE GOLDEN AGE OF LEO. 71 

lation, and never failed to win a rich benefice or a high posi- 
tion at the papal court. Leo read with fond and friendly at- 
tention the first volume of Jovius's history, pronounced him 
a new Livy, and covered him with honors and emoluments. 
He made the elegant style of Bembo the source of his wealth 
and greatness. He made the learned Sadoleto a bishop ; he 
cultivated the genius of the graceful Vida. For Greek and 
Latin scholars his kindness was unwearied; he aided Aldus 
by a liberal patent, and sought eagerly for rare manuscripts 
of the Greek and Latin classics. His hours of leisure were 
often passed in hearing some new poem or correcting some 
unpublished manuscript ; his happiest days were those he was 
sometimes enabled to spend amidst a throng of his friendly 
authors. For science he was no less zealous, and mathema- 
ticians, astronomers, geographers, and discoverers were all 
equally sure of a favorable reception at Kome. Leo was al- 
ways eager to hear of the strange adventures of the Spanish 
and Portuguese in the unknown lands, to converse with the 
brave Tristan Cunha, or to listen to Pigafetta's unpolished 
narrative of Magellan's wonderful voyage. 

Thus for eight years Rome echoed to the strains of count- 
less rival or friendly bards who sung to the ever-kindly ear of 
the attentive pontiff ; and a vast number of poems in Latin or 
Italian rose to renown, were quoted, admired, praised as not 
unworthy of Virgil or Catullus, and then sunk forever into 
neglect. Of all the poets of this fertile age, scarcely one sur- 
vives.^) The historians have been more fortunate. Machia- 
velli, Guicciardini, perhaps Jovius, are still remembered among 
the masters of the art. Castiglione is yet spoken of as a 
purer Chesterfield; the chaste and gifted Vittoria Colonna 
still lives as one of the jewels of her sex. But it is to its 
painters rather than its poets that this illustrious epoch owes 
its immortality. It is to Paffaello that Leo X. is indebted 
for many a lovely reminiscence that aids in rescuing his glory 
from oblivion. The traveler who wanders to Pome is chiefly 
reminded of Leo by the graceful flattery with which the first 

(') Roscoe, Leo X. 



72 LEO AND LUTHER. 

of painters has interwoven the life of his friend and master 
with his own finest works. He sees the portrait and exact 
features of Leo X. in the famous picture of Attila ; discovers 
an allusion to his life in the Liberation of St. Peter ; or re- 
members that it was to the taste and profuse liberality of the 
pontiff that we owe most of those rare frescoes in the Vatican 
with which Paffaello crowned his art. 

All through the brief period of scarcely seven years, so 
wonderful and varied were the labors of Paffaello, so constant 
the demands of the friendly but injudicious Pope, that we 
might well suppose the two friends to have been incessantly 
occupied in their effort to revive and recreate the ancient 
glory of Pome. To Paffaello these years were spent in fatal 
toil. His fancy, his genius, were never suffered to rest.Q 
Gentle, loving, easily touched, and fired by artistic ambition, 
soft and luxurious in his manners, unrestrained by moral laws, 
the great painter yielded to every wish of the eager Pope 
with an almost affectionate confidence, reflected all Leo's high 
ambition and longing after fame, toiled to complete St. Peter's, 
to adorn the Yatican, to perfect tapestries, paint portraits, to 
discover and protect the ancient works of art, to rebuild 
Pome; until at last, in the spring of 1520, his genius faded 
away, leaving its immortal fruits behind it. Other painters 
of unusual excellence took his place, but an illimitable dis- 
tance separates them all from Paffaello. 

Two great names are wanting to the splendid circle of Leo's 
court, and neither Ariosto nor Michael Angelo can be said to 
have belonged to his Golden Age. They seem to have shrunk 
from him almost with aversion. Ariosto was the only true 
genius among the poets of his time.( 2 ) His varied fancy, his 
brilliant colors, are the traits of the true artist. He had early 
been the friend of Leo before he became Pope ; he went up 
to Pome to congratulate the pontiff on his accession ; but some 
sudden coldness sprung up between the poet and the Pope 
which led to their complete estrangement. Ariosto was never 
seen at the banquets and splendid pageants of the Holy City ; 

O Roscoe, Leo X., ii., p. HO. . ( 2 ) Id., p. 122. 



THE POPE IN DANGER. 73 

his claims were neglected, his genius overlooked ; and the au- 
thor of " Orlando Furioso " lived and died in poverty, while 
Accolti and Aretino glittered in the prosperity of the papal 
court. Michael Angelo, too, stood aloof from the pontiff. 
His clear eye saw through the jewels and gold with which 
Leo had decked himself to the corruption of his inner life. 
Luxurious, licentious Raffaello might consent to obey the 
imperious will of the graceful actor, but his rival and master 
lived in a stern isolation. He preferred the conversation and 
the correspondence of the dignified Yittoria Colonna to the 
luxurious revelry of Leo and his satyr train. 

But Leo cared little for the absence of those whose deeper 
sensibilities might have disturbed the progress of his splendid 
visions. It was enough for him that he was the Sovereign 
Pontiff ; that he wore the tiara to which he had been destined 
from his birth. His life was to himself a complete success. 
It was passed in revelries and pageants, in the society of the 
rarest wits and the greatest of painters, in the government of 
nations and the defense of Italy. He was almost always 
cheerful, hopeful, busy, full of expedients. He lived seem- 
ingly unconcerned amidst a band of poisoners who were al- 
ways plotting his death, and a circle of subject princes who 
might at any moment overthrow his power. He smiled while 
the glittering sword hung over his head, and snatched the 
pleasures of life on the brink of a fearful abyss. To carry 
out his favorite plan, the elevation of his family to the regal 
rank, he had done many evil deeds. He robbed a Duke of 
Urbino of his patrimony through war and bloodshed; had 
driven the Petrucci from Siena ; was the relentless despoiler 
of the small states around him. Italy mourned that the Me- 
dici might become great. Yet so shrunken in numbers was 
the famous mercantile family, that of the direct legitimate 
descendants of Cosmo, Leo and his worthless nephew Lorenzo 
were all that were left. Lorenzo, a drunkard and a monster 
of vice, was the ruler of Florence, and for him Leo despoiled 
the Duke of Urbino ; to advance Lorenzo was the chief aim 
of his politics. He married him, at length, to Madeline of 
Tours ; he incurred a vast expense to make him great ; but, 



74 LEO AND LUTHER. 

happily for Florence, Lorenzo not long after died, leaving a 
daughter, the infamous Catherine de' Medici, the persecutor 
and the murderess ; and thus a descendant of Cosmo de' Me- 
dici became the mother of three kings of France. 

In the eyes of Europe, Leo seemed the most fortunate of 
men, the most accomplished of rulers, a model Pope. The 
manners and the gayeties of Rome and Florence were imi- 
tated in the less civilized courts of England, France, and Ger- 
many. The respect which Leo ever paid to artists, scholars, 
and men of letters led Francis, Charles, and Henry VIII. to 
become their patrons and their friends. Literature became 
the fashion. The polished student Erasmus wandered from 
court to court, and was everywhere received as the compan- 
ion of kings and princes. Henry VIII. aspired to the fame 
of authorship, and wrote bad Latin. Francis cherished poets 
and painters. Even the cold Charles V. caught the literary 
flame. Yet the manners of the court of Rome can scarcely 
be called refined. Leo was fond of coarse buffoonery and 
rude practical jokes. He invited notorious gluttons to his ta- 
ble, and was amused at the eagerness with which they devour- 
ed the costly viands, the peacock sausages, or the rare confec- 
tions^ 1 ) He was highly entertained by the sad drollery of 
idiots and dwarfs. A story is told of Baraballo, a silly old 
man of a noble family, who wrote bad verses and thought 
himself another Petrarch. Leo resolved to have him crowned 
like Petrarch in the Capitol. A day was appointed for the 
spectacle, costly preparations were made, and the silly Bara- 
ballo, decked with purple and gold, and mounted upon an ele- 
phant, the present of the King of Portugal, was led in tri- 
umph through the streets of Rome, amidst the shouts of the 
populace and the clamor of drums and trumpets.( 2 ) At the 
Bridge of St. Angelo, the elephant, more sensible than his 
rider, refused to go any farther ; Baraballo was forced to dis- 
mount ; all Rome was filled with laughter ; and Leo commem- 
orated his unfeeling joke by a piece of sculpture in wood, 
which is said to be still in existence. Leo was also passion- 

( J ) Jovius, p. 99. ( 2 ) Id., p. 97. 



THE CARDINALS WOULD POISON LEO. 75 

ately fond of hunting. ~No calls of business, no inclemency 
of the weather, could keep him from his favorite sport. He 
was never so happy as when shooting partridges and pheas- 
ants in the forests of Viterbo, or chasing wild boars on the 
Tuscan plains. To the fine ceremonial of his Church he is 
said to have been unusually attentive. He fasted often, in- 
toned with grace, and his love for music led him to gather 
from all parts of Europe the sweetest singers and the most 
skillful instrumental performers to adorn the Roman churches. 

Thus Leo glided gracefully onward, an accomplished actor, 
always conscious that the eye of Europe was upon him, and 
always elegant, polite, composed. Yet there must often have 
been moments when his gracious smile covered an inward ag- 
ony or a secret terror. His handsome, stately form was al- 
ways internally diseased; he suffered fierce pangs of pain 
which he told to few ; and often, as he presided at the gay 
banquet or some stormy meeting of his holy college, he must 
have mastered with iron energy the terrible agony inflicted by 
a hidden disease. But far worse even than actual suffering 
was the constant dread in which he must have always lived. 
He was surrounded by poisoners who sought his life. His 
daily associates were those most likely to present to him the 
deadly draught. It was the holy college that had resolved 
upon his destruction. 

The cardinals formed a plot to poison the Pope.Q He had 
disappointed them in living when they had looked for his 
speedy death, and he had never been able to gratify the bound- 
less claims they had made upon the sacred treasury. They 
were the most resolute and unwearied of beggars. " You had 
better at once take my tiara," said the weary pontiff when he 
was once surrounded by the holy mendicants ; and he ever 
after was hated by most of his cardinals. Among them, too, 
were several who had some private reason for seeking Leo's 
death. The author of the plot, Alfonso Petrucci, had lost his 
revenues at Siena by the fall of his family in that city, and 
had vowed revenge. He was a young man, fierce, dissolute, 

O Jovius, pp. 88, 89. 



76 LEO AND LUTHER. 

gay, feeble. He was accustomed to proclaim openly among 
his wild companions his hatred for Leo and his plans of venge- 
ance. Often he came to the meetings of the sacred college 
with a dagger hidden in his breast, and was only withheld 
from plunging it in Leo's heart by the fear of seizure. At 
length he concerted with a famous physician the plan of poison. 
The most eminent man in the college of cardinals was Eiario, 
Cardinal San Giorgio. He was the wealthiest of his order. 
He had been a cardinal for forty years. In his youth he had 
shared in the plot to murder Lorenzo de' Medici, and now in 
his old age he aided Petrucci in his design against Leo. He 
hoped, on the Pope's death, to become his successor. Another 
conspirator was the Cardinal de' Sauli, who had furnished Pe- 
trucci with money. Another, Soderinus, the enemy of the 
Medici, from Florence. The last was the silly Adrian of 
Corneto. This foolish old man had been assured by a female 
prophet that the successor to Leo would be named Adrian, 
and felt sure that no one but himself could be meant. It was 
observed that the soothsayer spoke truly, and that the next 
Pope was Adrian ; but not the poisoner. How many others 
of the college were engaged in the plot is not told. Happily 
Leo had been watching Petrucci for some time, and intercept- 
ed a letter that revealed the whole design. Petrucci was ab- 
sent from Rome,, and Leo, in order to get him into his power, 
sent him a safe-conduct, and even assured the Spanish embas- 
sador that he would observe it. The conspirator came laughing 
boastfully to the city. He was at once seized and shut up in 
the Castle of St. Angelo with his friend De' Sauli ; and Leo 
excused his own bad faith by alleging the enormity of the 
crime. 

Pale, agitated, trembling, the Pope now met his cardinals 
in the consistory. There was scarcely one to whom he could 
trust his life. He was surrounded by secret or open assassins, 
and he might well fear lest a dagger was hidden beneath each 
sacred robe.Q He addressed them, however, with his usual 
dignity ; he complained that he, who had always been so kind 

( l ) Jovius, p. 89. Guicciard., siii. 



LEO'S EXTRAVAGANCE. 77 

and liberal to them, should thus be threatened by their con- 
spiracies. Kiario, the head of the college, was already under 
arrest ; Petrucci and De' Sauli were confined in horrible dun- 
geons. The Cardinal Soderini fell down at Leo's feet, con- 
fessing his guilt, and the foolish Adrian was equally penitent. 
In his punishment of the offenders Leo showed all the severi- 
ty of his nature. Petrucci was strangled in prison, De' Sauli 
was released on paying a heavy fine, but died the next year, it 
was believed of poison. Kiario, the venerable assassin, was 
also fined heavily and forgiven. Poor Adrian fled from Eome, 
with the loss of his estate, and was never heard of more. Thus 
Leo broke forever the power of his enemies, the sacred college, 
and at the same time replenished his treasury by the confisca- 
tion of their estates. Soon after, by a vigorous stroke of pol- 
icy, he created thirty-one new cardinals. In many cases the 
office was sold to the highest bidder, and thus Leo was once 
more rich, and happy.Q He was now (1517) at the height 
of his power. The Church was omnipotent, and Leo was the 
Church. His cardinals never afterward gave him any trou- 
ble ; every heretic had been suppressed or burned ; the city of 
Eome was the centre of civilization as well as of religion; 
money flowed in upon it from all the world ; and the lavish 
pontiff wasted the treasures of the Church in every kind of 
magnificent extravagance. 

It was because Leo was a splendid spendthrift that we have 
the Keformation through Luther. The Pope was soon again 
impoverished and in debt. He never thought of the cost of 
any thing ; he was lavish without reflection. His wars, in- 
trigues, his artists and architects, his friends, but above all the 
miserable Lorenzo, exhausted his fine revenues ; and his treas- 
ury must again be supplied. When he was in want, Leo was 
never scrupulous as to the means by which he retrieved his 
affairs ; he robbed, he defrauded, he begged ; he drew contri- 
butions from all Europe for a Turkish war, which all Europe 
knew had been spent upon Lorenzo; he collected large sums 
for rebuilding St. Peter's, which were all expended in the same 

O Jovius, p. 90. 



78 LEO AND LUTHER. 

way ; in fine, Leo early exhausted all his spiritual arts as well 
as his treasury^ 1 ) 

Suddenly there opened before his hopeless mind an El Do- 
rado richer than ever Spanish adventurer had discovered, 
more limitless than the treasures of the East and West. It 
was purgatory. Over that shadowy realm the Pope held un- 
disputed sway. The severest casuist of the age would admit 
that the spiritual power of the Church was in that direction 
limitless. It was nearly a hundred years since Tauler, the 
German reformer, had suffered martyrdom for denying that 
the Pope could condemn an innocent man to eternal woe or 
raise the guiltiest to the habitations of the blest; and from 
that hour the authority of the pontiff had been constantly in- 
creasing, until now he was looked upon as nothing less than 
Deity upon earth. He held in his polluted hands the key of 
immortality. But even had a doubt arisen as to the efficacy 
of the keys, the pious Aquinas had shown by the clearest ar- 
gument that the Church possessed a boundless supply of the 
merits of the saints, and even of its Divine Head, which 
might be applied to the succor of any soul that seemed to re- 
quire external aid. Leo seized upon the notion of the school- 
men, and extended it to an extreme which they perhaps had 
never anticipated. He pressed the sale of his indulgences. 
He offered full absolution to every criminal who would pay 
him a certain sum of money, joined with contrition ; without 
contrition, and for a similar payment, he offered to diminish 
the term for which any person was condemned to purgatory, 
or to set free from the pains of purgatory the departed spirit 
whose friends would pay a proper remuneration.^) Over the 
shadowy land in whose existence he can scarcely have be- 
lieved, the pontiff presumed to extend his earthly sceptre — to 
divide it into periods of years, to map it out in distinct grada- 
tions, and to sell to the highest bidder the longest exemption 
or a swift release. It was a dreadful impiety, a horrible 
mockery ; it was selling immortal bliss for money. 

(>) Jovius, p. 92-96. 

( 2 ) Ranke, Ref. ; i. ; p. 335. Robertson, Charles V., book ii. 



INDULGENCES. 79 

The indulgence was first used by Urban II., in the period 
of the first crusade, to reward those who took up arms for the 
relief of the Holy Land. It was then granted to any one 
who hired soldiers for the war; and was next extended to 
those who gave money to the Pope for some pious purpose. 
Julius II. had employed it to raise money to rebuild St. 
Peter's, and Leo X. sold his indulgences upon the same pre- 
text^ 1 ) But Leo's indulgence, as set forth by his agents in 
Germany, far excelled those of his predecessors in its daring 
assumption. It pardoned all sins however gross, restored its 
purchaser to that state of innocence which he had possessed at 
baptism, and at his death opened at once to him the gates of 
paradise. From the moment that he had obtained this valua- 
ble paper he became one of the elect. He could never fall.( 2 ) 
Whatever his future crimes, his salvation was assured. The 
honor of the Pope and the Church was pledged to secure him 
against any punishment he might merit in a future world, and 
to raise him at last to the society of the blessed. But proba- 
bly the most attractive and merchantable part of the indul- 
gence was that which set free departed spirits from purgato- 
rial pains. This ingenious device played upon the tenderest 
and most powerful instincts of nature. What parent could 
refuse to purchase the salvation of a dead child ? What son 
but would sell his all to redeem parents and relatives from 
purgatory ? It was upon such themes that the strolling vend- 
ers of indulgences constantly enlarged. They gathered around 
them a gaping throng of wondering rustics; they stood by 
the village church-yard and pointed to the humble graves. 
" Will you allow your father to suffer," Tetzel cried out to a 
credulous son, " when twelve pence will redeem him from tor- 
ment ? If you had but one coat, you should strip it off, sell 
it, and purchase my wares." " Hear you not," he would say 
to another, "the groans of your lost child in yonder church- 
yard? Come and buy his immediate salvation. ISTo sooner 
shall your money tinkle in my box than his soul will ascend to 

( 3 ) Sarpi, Con. Tri., p. 4 et seq. Palavicini, Hist. Con. Trident. 
( 2 ) Seckendorf, Com., i. ? p. 14. 



80 LEO AND LUTHER. 

heaven." Thus Leo made a traffic of immortal bliss. There 
is something almost sublime in his presumption. From his 
gorgeous throne in the Eternal City he stood before mankind 
claiming a divine authority over the world and all that it con- 
tained. Kings, emperors, princes, were his inferiors and his 
spiritual serfs. He divided the globe between the Spaniards 
and Portuguese. His simple legate was to take the prece- 
dence of princes. It was the fashion of the churchmen of the 
day to magnify their office, to claim for it an immutable supe- 
riority, as if the office sanctified the possessor. Q Conscious of 
their own impurity and hypocrisy, they sought, as is so often 
the case with immoral priests, to raise themselves above pub- 
lic scrutiny, and to create for themselves a position amidst 
the clouds of imputed sanctity, where, like their prototypes, 
the heathen gods, they might sin unchallenged. They looked 
down with contempt upon the too curious worshiper, who was 
unfit to touch their garments ; they veiled themselves in the 
dignity of the office they degraded. But the earthly state 
assumed by the haughty priests was as nothing compared to 
their spiritual claims. The Popes professed to concentrate in 
themselves all the power and virtue of the Church. They 
were its despots. ( 2 ) The evil Alexander and the fierce Julius 
had condemned to eternal woe whoever should appeal to a 
council. Leo spoke to the world as its divine ruler. He was 
the possessor of all the merits of the saints and martyrs, and 
of the boundless sufficiency of Calvary. He ruled over the 
future world as well as the present ;( 3 ) he could unfold the 
gates of paradise, and snatch the guilty from the jaws of hell ; 
his power extended over countless subjects in the shadowy 
world, whose destiny depended on his pleasure, and who were 
the slaves of his caprice. 

The indulgences at first sold well. But their sale was 
chiefly confined to Germany.( 4 ) Spain, under the control of 

O See Eccius, De Primatu Petri, 1520. 

( 2 ) Eccius argues that the Church must be a monarchy, ii., p. 81. 

( 3 ) The control of demons is still asserted. See Propagation de la Foi, 
1867, pp. 39, 439. At least Chinese demons. 

( 4 ) Ranke, Ref. ; i., p. 332-335. . 



AN EL DOEADO. 81 

Ximenes, had long before refused to permit its wealth to be 
drained into the treasury of Kome. France was hostile to the 
Pope. England yielded only a small return. But over the 
dull peasants of Germany the acute Italians had succeeded in 
weaving their glittering web of superstition, until that unhap- 
py land had become the El Dorado of the Church. Every 
year immense sums of money had flowed from Germany to 
Eome for annats, palliums, and various other ecclesiastical de- 
vices ; and now the whole country was divided into three great 
departments under the care of three commissions for the sale 
of indulgences. Q Itinerant traders in the sacred commodity 
passed from town to town and fair to fair, extolling the value 
of their letters of absolution and pressing them upon the pop- 
ular attention. They were followed wherever they went by 
great throngs of people ; and their loud voices, coarse jokes, 
and shameless eloquence seem to have been attended with 
extraordinary success. They are represented as having been 
usually persons of worthless characters and licentious morals, 
who passed their nights in drinking and revelry at taverns, 
and their days in making a mockery of religion ; who proved 
the value of the plenary indulgence by the daring immorality 
of their lives. They were secure in the shelter of Rome, and 
had a safe-conduct to celestial bliss. 

The Elector Frederick of Saxony was now the most power- 
ful of the German princes. His dominions were extensive 
and wealthy ; he was sagacious, firm, and honest ; and he had 
always opposed with success the various efforts of the Popes 
to draw contributions from his priest-ridden subjects. ( 2 ) Fred- 
erick was already irritated against the Elector of Mentz, who 
had in charge the sale of indulgences ; and he openly declared 
that Albert should not pay his private debts " out of the pock- 
ets of the Saxons." He saw with indignation that his people 
were beginning to resort in great numbers to the sellers of the 
pious frauds. But the resistance of Frederick to the religious 
excitement of the day would have proved ineffectual had he 
not been aided by an humble instrument whose future omnip- 

0) Ranke, Ref., i., p. 333. ( 2 ) Id., p. 341. 



82 LEO AND LUTHER. 

otence lie could scarcely have foreseen. It was to a poor monk 
that Saxony and Germany were to owe their deliverance from 
Italian priestcraft. Five years had passed since Martin Lu- 
ther had returned from his pilgrimage to Rome, with his hon- 
est conscience stricken and horrified by the pagan atmosphere 
of the Holy City. During that period the poor scholar had 
risen to eminence and renown.Q He had become professor 
in the university at Wittenberg, which the Elector Frederick 
had founded ; his eloquence and learning, his purity and his 
vigor, had given him a strong control over the students and 
the people of the small scholastic city. Already he had 
wrought a lesser reformation in the manners and the lives of 
the throngs who listened to his animated preaching ; already 
he had even planned a general reform of the German Church. 
But as yet Luther had entertained no doubts of the papal su- 
premacy. He still practiced all the austerity of penance, and 
still clung to all the formulas of his faith. The Pope was 
still to him a deity upon earth ; Rome, the city of St. Peter 
and the martyrs ; the Fathers, an indisputable authority ; and 
although he had learned to study the Scriptures with earnest 
attention, he yet interpreted them by the light of other con- 
sciences than his own. His honest intellect still slumbered 
under that terrible weight of superstition beneath which the 
cunning Italians had imprisoned the mind of the Middle 
Ages. 

A shock aroused Luther from his slumber ; a shock startled 
all Germany into revolt. The loud voice of the shameless 
Tetzel was heard in Saxony extolling his impious wares, and 
claiming to be the dispenser of immortal bliss. His life had 
been one of gross immorality ; he was an ignorant and coarse 
Dominican ; his rude jokes and brutal demeanor, his revelries 
and his licentious tongue, filled pious men with affright. He 
ventured to approach Wittenberg, and some of Luther's pa- 
rishioners wandered away to the neighboring towns of Juter- 
bock to join with the multitude who were buying absolution 

(*) Luther's Briefwechsel, by Burkbardt, 1868. He soon begins to corre- 
spond with tbe bigbest officials. 



LUTHER'S DANGER. ' 83 

from the dissolute friar. Q It was the decisive moment of 
modern history. The mightiest intellect of the age was 
roused into sudden action ; the intellect whose giant strength 
was to shiver to atoms the magnificent fabric of papal super- 
stition, and give freedom to thought and liberty to man. Lu- 
ther rose up inspired. He wrote out in fair characters his 
ninety -five propositions on the doctrine of indulgences, and 
nailed them (1517) to the gates of his parochial church at 
Wittenberg. He proclaimed to mankind that the Pope had 
no power to forgive sin ; that the just must live by faith. 
Swift as the electric flash which had won him from the world 
his bold thoughts rushed over Germany, and startled the cor- 
rupt atmosphere of Rome. It is related that just after his 
daring act the Elector Frederick, as he slept in his castle of 
Schweinitz, on the night of All-Saints, dreamed that he saw 
the monk writing on the chapel at Wittenberg in characters 
so large that they could be read at Schweinitz; longer and 
longer grew Luther's pen, till at last it reached Eome, struck 
the Pope's triple crown, and made it tremble on his head. 
Frederick stretched forth his arm to catch the tiara as it fell, 
but just then awoke. All Germany dreamed a similar dream ; 
it awoke to find it a reality. ( 2 ) 

Germany was then no safe place for reformers or heretics. 
It was in a state of miserable anarchy and barbarism. The 
great cities, grown rich by commerce and honest industry, 
were engaged in constant hostilities with the robber knights 
whose powerful castles studded the romantic banks of the 
Rhine and filled the fastnesses of the interior.( 3 ) Often the 
long trains of wealthy traders on their way to Nuremberg or 
the fair at Leipsic were set upon by the lordly robbers, who 
sprung upon them from some castled crag, their rare goods 
were ravished away, their hard-earned gains torn from them, 
and the prisoners condemned to torture and dismal dungeons 
until they had paid an excessive ransom. Often rich burgh- 
ers came back to their native cities from some unfortunate 
trading expedition impoverished, with one hand lopped off, 

O Ranke, Ref., i., p. 343. ( 2 ) Id., i., p. 343. ( 3 ) Id., i., p. 223. 



84 LEO AND LUTHER. 

and showing their bleeding arms to their enraged fellow-citi- 
zens. Even poor scholars were often seized, tortured, and the 
miserable sums they had won by begging torn from them by 
the brutal nobles. The knights, like Gotz von Berlichingen, 
boasted that they were the wolves, and the rich traders the 
sheep upon whom they preyed. But terrible was the revenge 
which the citizens were accustomed to take upon their de- 
spoilers. When their mounted train-bands issued forth from 
the gates of Nuremberg the tenants of every castle trembled 
and grew pale. The brave Nurembergers swept the country 
far and wide. They scaled the lofty crags, swarmed over the 
tottering walls, and burned or massacred the robbers in their 
dens. Noble birth was then of no avail; knightly prowess 
awoke no pity ; the castle was made the smoldering grave of 
its owners. Yet the knights would soon again renew their 
strongholds, and once more revive this perpetual civil war. 
Every part of Germany was desolated by the ruthless strife. 

Above the knights were the princes and electors, who prey- 
ed upon the people by taxes and heavy contributions. At the 
head of all stood the Emperor Maximilian, who seized upon 
whatever he could get by force or fraud. Yet the influence 
most fatal to the prosperity of Germany was that of the Ital- 
ian Church. Rome ruled over Germany with a remorseless 
sway. Heresy was punished by the fierce Dominicans with 
torture and the stake. The Church, it is estimated, held near- 
ly one-half of all the land, and would pay no taxes. Every 
church was an asylum in which murderers and malefactors 
found a safe refuge, and the Church establishments in the rich 
cities were looked upon by the prosperous citizens as fatal to 
the public peace. They were dens of thieves and assassins. 
The characters of the German priests and monks, too, were 
often vile beyond description, and the classic satire of Eras- 
mus and the skillful pencil of Holbein have portrayed only 
an outline of their crimes. 

In such a land Luther must have felt that he could scarcely 
hope for safety. He must have foreseen, as he took his ir- 
revocable step, that he exposed himself to the Inquisition and 
the stake. He was at once encountered by a host of enemies. 



GERMANY UNQUIET. 85 

Tetzel declaimed against him in coarse invectives as a heretic 
worthy of death.Q Priests and professors, the universities 
and the pulpit, united in his condemnation. He was already 
marked out by his enemies as the victim whose blood was to 
seal the supremacy of the Pope. Yet his wonderful intellect 
in this moment of danger began now to display its rare fer- 
tility. He wrote incessantly in defense of his opinions ; his 
treatises spread over Germany; and very soon the reform 
tracts, multiplied by the printing-press, were sold and distrib- 
uted in great numbers through all the fairs and cities of the 
land. The German intellect awoke with the controversy, and 
all true Germans began to look with admiration and sym- 
pathy upon the brave monk who had ventured to defy the 
power of the papal court. At Pome, meantime, nothing was 
less thought of than a schism in the Church. Leo was at the 
height of his prosperity. He had just dissolved the Lateran 
Council, which had yielded him a ready obedience ; his cardi- 
nals were submissive ; he was the most powerful and fortunate 
of Popes. From dull and priest-ridden Germany he looked 
for no trouble, and when he first heard of the controversy be- 
tween Luther and the Dominicans he spoke of it as a wrangle 
of barbarous monks. The fierce storm that was gathering in 
the North was scarcely noticed amidst the gay banquets and 
tasteful revelries of Pome. Put this could not continue long. 
It was soon seen by the papal courtiers that if Luther was 
permitted to write and live, a large part of their revenues 
would be cut off ; and Leo himself felt that if he allowed his 
dominion over purgatory to be called in question, he must 
soon cease to adorn the Yatican or subsidize Lorenzo. If he 
lost his shadowy El Dorado, where could he turn for money % 
The remedy was easy ; he must silence or destroy the monk. 
He issued a summons (July, 1518) for Luther to appear at 
Pome within sixty days, to answer for his heresies before his 
Inquisitor-General. Soon after, as he learned the extent of 
his danger, he sent orders to his legate in Germany to have 
the monk seized and brought to the Holy City. 

O Ranke, Eef., i. ; p. 347. 



86 LEO AND LUTHER. 

If this arrogant decree had been executed, there can be little 
doubt as to what must have been Luther's fate. He must have 
pined away in some Roman dungeon, have perished under 
torture, or have sunk, like the offending cardinals, beneath the 
slow effect of secret poison. The insignificant monk would 
have proved an easy victim to the experts of Rome. But, 
fortunately for the reformer, all Germany was now become 
his friend. In a few brief months he had become a hero. 
Never was there so sudden a rise to influence and renown. 
His name was already famous from the Baltic to the Alps ; 
scholars and princes wrote to him words of encouragement ; 
the common people followed him as their leader; and the 
great Elector of Saxony, the most potent of the German 
princes, was the open patron of the eloquent monk. Ger- 
many was resolved that its honest thinker should not be ex- 
posed to the evil arts of Rome ; and Leo, obliged to employ 
milder expedients to enforce his authority, consented that his 
chief adversary should be permitted to defend his opinions 
before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg. It was Luther's first 
great victory. 

Still, however, he was in imminent danger. If Germany 
was on his side, yet all the Italian Germans were more than 
ever eager for his destruction. The corrupt priests, the dis- 
solute monks, the fierce Dominicans, the Pope, the Church, 
even the Emperor Maximilian, were arrayed against the true- 
hearted monk. He lived in the constant presence of death. 
Yet his. spiritual agonies- were, no doubt, to Luther more intol- 
erable than any physical danger ; for he was still only a search- 
er after truth. His nights and days were passed in an eager 
study of the Scriptures; he moved slowly onward through 
an infinite course of mental improvement ; he was forced to 
snatch the jewels of faith from the dim caverns of supersti- 
tion ; he groped his way painfully toward the light. Yet so 
admirable was the disposition of this renowned reformer that 
through all his dangers he was always hopeful, often joyous 
and gay. Sickness, pain, mental or physical terrors, could nev- 
er deprive his gallant nature of its hidden stores of joy and 
peace. His clear voice often rose high in song or hymn ; he 



INTELLECTUAL TOURNEYS. 87 

was the gay and cheerful companion, always the tender friend ; 
his lute often sounded cheerfully in still nights at "Wittenberg 
or Wartburg; and his love for poetry and letters soothed 
many an hour he was enabled to win from his weary labors. 
Compared with his persecutor, Leo, Luther's was by far the 
happier life. His joys were pure, his impulses noble, his con- 
science stainless; while Leo strove to find his joy in coarse 
buffoonery and guilty revels, in outward magnificence and 
idle glitter. 

There now began a series of wonderful intellectual tourna- 
ments, the successors of the brutal encounters of chivalry and 
the Middle Ages, in which the true knight, Luther, beat down 
his pagan assailants with the iron mace of truth.Q It had be- 
come the custom in Germany for scholars to dispute before 
splendid audiences abstruse questions of philosophy and learn- 
ing ; but the questions which Luther discussed were such as 
had never been ventured upon before. Was the Pope infalli- 
ble ? Could he save a guilty soul % Could not even councils 
err ? Was not Huss a true martyr ? Knights, princes, emper- 
ors, gathered round the pale, sad monk as he discussed these 
daring themes, heard with a strange awe his eloquent argu- 
ment which they scarcely understood, and were still in doubt 
whether to accept him as a leader or to bind him to the stake. 
The first of these noted encounters occurred (1518) at Augs- 
burg, where the graceful Cardinal Cajetan, fresh from the At- 
tic atmosphere of Eome, came to subdue the barbarous Ger- 
man by force or fraud. Luther came to the hostile city full 
of fears of the subtlety of his polished opponent.( a ) He felt 
that it was by no means incredible that the cardinal was com- 
missioned to seize him and carry him to a Poman prison ; he 
knew that Maximilian, who was still Emperor of Germany, 
was not unwilling to gratify the Pope by his surrender. Yet 
so poor and humble was this object of the enmity of prelates 
and rulers that Luther was obliged to beg his way to Augs- 
burg. Sick, faint, dressed in a borrowed cowl, his frame 
gaunt and thin, his wild eyes glittering with supernatural 

O Walch, xxiv., p. 434. ( 2 ) Ranke, Ref., i., p. 427. 



88 LEO AND LUTHER. 

fire, the monk entered the city. The people crowded to see 
him pass ; he was protected by a safe- conduct from Maximil- 
ian and the patronage of Elector Frederick ; and he met the 
cardinal boldly. Yet it was hardly an equal encounter ; for 
Luther was sick, faint, poor, and in peril of his life, while 
Cajetan, in the glow of wealth and power, was the legate and 
representative of infallible Rome. At first, in several inter- 
views, the cardinal consented to argue, but when Luther com- 
pletely confused and overthrew him, the enraged combatant, 
with a false and meaning smile, commanded the monk to sub- 
mit to the judgment of the Church. Luther soon after fled 
from Augsburg, conscious that he was no longer safe in the 
hands of his enemies. Leo, in November, issued his bull de- 
claring his right to grant indulgences, and the monk replied, 
with bold menaces, by an appeal from the Pope to the decis- 
ion of a council of the Church. 

Maximilian died, and an interregnum followed, during 
which the Elector of Saxony became the ruler of Germany. 
Safe in his protection, the monk continued to write, to preach, 
to advance in religious knowledge; and a wild excitement 
arose throughout the land. Melanchthon joined Luther at 
Wittenberg, a young man of twenty, the best Greek scholar 
of his time, and the two friends pursued their studies and 
their war against the Pope together. But a second grand in- 
tellectual tournament soon summoned the knight-errant of re- 
ligious liberty to buckle on his armor. It was at Leipsic, a 
city devoted to the papacy, that Luther was to defend the 
Reformation.^) His chief opponent was Eck or Eccius, a 
German priest, learned, eloquent, ambitious, corrupt, and eager 
to win the favor of his master at Rome. He had assailed the 
opinions of Carlstadt, one of Luther's associates at Witten- 
berg, and now the reformer was to appear in defense of his 
friend. The Leipsic university was bitterly hostile to Wit- 
tenberg and reform, and Eck rejoiced to have an opportunity 
to display his eloquence and learning in the midst of the most 
Catholic city of Germany. It was whispered that Eck was 

O Walch, xxiv., p. 434. 



LUTHER AND ECE. 89 

too fond of Bavarian beer, and that his morals were far from 
purity ; yet he was welcomed by the students and professors 
of Leipsic with joy and proud congratulations as the invincible 
champion of the Church. 

Soon the Wittenbergers appeared, riding in low, open wag- 
ons, to the hostile city, in the pleasant month of June. Carl- 
stadt came first, then Luther and Melanchthon, then the young 
Duke of Pomerania, a student and rector of Wittenberg, and 
then a throng of other students, most of them on foot and 
armed with halberds, battle-axes, and spears, to defend them- 
selves or their professors in case of attack ; and it was noticed 
as a mark of unusual discourtesy that none of the Leipsic col- 
legians or teachers came out to meet their literary rivals. Yet 
every necessary preparation had been made by the good-nat- 
ured Duke George for the mental combat. A spacious hall 
in the castle, hung with tapestry and provided with two pul- 
pits for the speakers and seats for a large audience, was ar- 
ranged for the occasion; and the proceedings opened with 
a solemn mass. A noble and splendid audience filled the 
room.Q The interest was intense ; the champions, the most 
renowned theologians in Germany ; their subject, the origin 
and authority of the papal power at Rome.Q Carlstadt com- 
menced the argument, but in a few days he was completely 
discomfited by his practiced opponent. The Wittenbergers 
were covered with confusion. Eck's loud voice, tall, muscular 
figure, violent gestures, quick retort, and ready learning seem- 
ed to carry him over the field invincible. But on the 4th of 
July, a day memorable for another reform, the interest was re- 
doubled as Martin Luther rose. He was of middle size, and 
so thin as to seem almost fleshless. His voice was weak com- 
pared to that of his opponent ; his bearing mild and modest. 
But he was now in his thirty-sixth year ; his intellect, worn by 
many toils and ceaseless labor, was in its full vigor ; and his 
eager search after truth had given him a strength and novelty 
of thought that no scholar of the age could equal. He as- 
cended the platform with joy, and it was noticed that the fond 

0) Walch ? xxiv., p. 434-437. ( 2 ) It led to this. 



90 LEO AND LTJTHEB. 

lover of nature carried a nosegay in his hand. Luther, at once 
neglecting all minor topics, assailed the authority of the Pope. 
"With perfect self-command he ruled his audience at will, and 
princes and professors listened with awe and almost terror as 
they heard the daring novelty of his argument. From deny- 
ing the authority of the Pope he advanced to the denial of 
the supremacy of a council ; he unfolded with eloquent candor 
the long train of progressive thought through which his own 
mind had just passed ; to the horror of all true Catholics, he 
suggested that Huss might have been a martyr. The audience 
was appalled ; Duke George, startled, uttered a loud impreca- 
tion. The discomfited Eccius exclaimed, " Then, reverend fa- 
ther, you are to me as a heathen and a publican." 

The Wittenbergers returned in safety and triumph to their 
college. But the corrupt nature of Eck, exasperated by Lu- 
ther's bold defiance, led him to resolve on the destruction of 
his opponent. Nothing would satisfy him but that the brave 
monk should meet the fate of John Huss or Jerome of Prague. 
Eck, like Luther, was a German peasant's son ;( J ) his persistent 
malignity now decided the destiny of the Church. He has- 
tened to Rome, and aroused the passions of Leo by his fierce 
declamations against Luther ; the prudent pontiff seems to have 
been forced into extreme measures by the violence of the cor- 
rupt German; and Eck returned to Germany armed with a 
papal bull condemning Luther's writings to the flames,( 2 ) and 
commanding him to recant his heresies within sixty days, or 
to be expelled from the Church. But Luther had already re- 
solved to abandon the Church of Pome forever. He pro- 
claimed his decision by a remarkable act. On the 10th. of De- 
cember, 1520, in the presence of an immense throng of stu- 
dents, magistrates, and persons of every rank, the bold monk 
cast into a blazing fire, without the walls of Wittenberg, 
the Pope's bull and a copy of the papal decrees. From their 
smoldering ashes sprung up the Church of the Pef ormation. 

Leo, enraged beyond endurance, now issued the bull of ex- 
communication, the most terrible of the anathemas of the 

C) Ranke, Ref., i., p. 444. ( 2 ) Dated June 15th, 1520. 



LUTHER SUMMONED TO WOBMS. 91 

Church. Luther was declared accursed of God and man. 
There had been a time when snch a sentence would have ap- 
palled the greatest monarch in Christendom; when the ex- 
communicate had been looked upon by all men with horror 
and dread ; when he was cut off from the society of his fel- 
lows, and was held as an outlaw deserving of instant death. 
But to Luther no such fatal consequences followed. His 
friends gathered around him more firmly than ever; men of 
intellect in every land acknowledged his greatness, and Ger- 
many rejoiced in the fame of its hero. Yet nothing is more 
remarkable in the history of this wonderful man than that 
he escaped death by poison or assassination ; that in the midst 
of a land of anarchy and crime, surrounded by powerful en- 
emies, cut off from the Church, accursed by the Pope, he 
should yet have been permitted to pursue, unmolested, his 
career of reform, to succeed in all his designs, to baffle all his 
foes, and finally to die in peace, surrounded by his loving 
family, in the very town where he was born. Another mighty 
foe had now suddenly started up as if to complete Luther's 
ruin. Charles Y. had become Emperor of Germany. He 
was a young man of twenty, cold, grave, sickly, unscrupulous ; 
he had been educated in the remorseless school of the Domin- 
icans, and was the most devoted servant of the Church. To 
Charles Leo now appealed for aid against the arch-heretic, and 
the young monarch summoned Luther before him at the fa- 
mous Diet of Worms. "Q 

Far and wide over Germany spread the news that the re- 
former had been cited to appear before the Emperor, and all 
men believed that the crisis of his fate was at hand. Every 
eye was turned upon the humble monk. The peasant's son 
was about to stand before princes, and every true German 
heart warmed with love and pity for him, who seemed certain 
to fall before his mighty foes. Luther's friends strove to 
prevent him from venturing within the hostile city. " You 
will be another Huss !" they exclaimed.Q They suggested 



(*) Walch, xxiv., p. 459. Audin, ii., p. 101, and Michelet, chiefly follow 
Walch. * 



92 LEO AND LUTHER. 

the subtle cruelty of the Italians and the implacable enmity 
of the priests. But Luther seemed urged on by an irresistible 
impulse to go to Worms and plead his cause before the em- 
peror, the princes, Europe, and all coming ages. " I would 
go," he cried, " though my enemies had raised a wall of tire 
between Eisenach and Worms reaching to the skies !" " I will 
be there," he said again, " though as many demons surround 
me as there are tiles on the roofs of the houses !" In his 
rapt, half -inspired state he believed that Satan and his angels 
had encompassed him on every side, and that their chief object 
was to prevent his reaching the city. It is certain that all 
the evil passions, every corrupt desire, every immoral impulse 
of the age, hung like raging demons over the path of the re- 
former.^) 

Never was there a more memorable journey than that of 
Luther over the heart of Germany, from Wittenberg to 
Worms. It was Daniel going to the lions' den ; it was a hero 
traveling to his doom; it was the successful champion of 
many an intellectual tournament couching his gallant lance 
against the citadel of his foes. It was spring, and the early 
leaves and flowers were clustering around the pleasant paths 
of Germany. Sturm, the emperor's herald, appeared at 
Wittenberg, and said, " Master Luther, are you ready ?" The 
monk assented cheerfully, and at once set out. He traveled 
in a very different way from that in which he had entered 
Augsburg two years before, begging his subsistence from 
town to town. Now he was the renowned champion of a 
new Germany ; the harbinger of a brighter era. The herald, 
clothed in gay attire, rode before him. Luther followed in a 
low wagon or chariot, accompanied by several friends. By 
his side was the learned doctor of laws, Schurf, his legal 
adviser, and several theologians. As he passed the popula- 
tion of the cities came out to meet him ; princes and nobles 
greeted him on every hand, and pressed money upon him to 



( x ) Walch, xxiv., p. 460 : " Seine gute Freunde riethen ilim von der 
ErsclieinuDg ab uud stellen ihm Hussens Exempel vor." 
O Walch, xxiv., p. 462. 



LUTHER'S HYMN. 93 

pay his extraordinary expenses ; even hostile Leipsic offered 
him as a pledge of hospitality a draught of rare wine ; at 
Weimar the good duke forced gold upon him; at various 
places he was forced to preach before immense congregations. 
Yet in every city he saw posted in the public streets the bull 
condemning his writings to the flames. He paused a while 
at Erfurth, and wept as he revisited his little cell, with its 
solitary table and small garden, and remembered the wild July 
morning when the angry lightning-flash had won him from 
the world.Q He passed through Eisenach, was taken very 
ill there, and had nearly died in the town where, a beggar- 
child, thirty years before, he surig his mournful melodies from 
door to door. He saw his relatives from Mansfeld, his peas- 
ant family, and parted in tears from the well-known scenes. 
And thus, as if to prepare him for his doom, or to arm him 
for the fight, in this memorable journey, Luther's vivid mind 
must have pictured to itself a perfect outline of his by-gone 
life. 

On the 16th of April Luther saw in the distance the towers 
of Worms. The fiery furnace lay before him.( 2 ) He firmly 
believed that he was going to his death, but his only fear was 
that his cause might perish with him. Tradition relates that, 
as he saw the city afar off, Luther rose up in his chariot and 
sung, in a resonant voice, a noble hymn which he had com- 
posed on the way, " God, our strong tower and defense, our 
help in every need." It is a poetical thought ; it stirs the 
fancy as we narrate it. The venerable city of Worms was 
now thronged with all the great and powerful of Germany : 
the emperor, the bishops, the papal legate, the princes, and a 
host of armed men, citizens, and priests. As the monk ap- 
proached in his wagon, he was met by a wild enthusiasm 
greater than ever princes or bishops had awakened. He was 
surrounded by throngs of people; the roofs of the houses 
were covered with eager spectators ; his pale, worn counte- 
nance must have been brightened by a sentiment of gratitude 

( x ) Audin, ii. ? p. 101-105. He "railed at monks and priests on his way," 
says Audin. C) Walch, xxiv., p. 463. 



94 LEO AND LUTHER. 

and triumph as he felt that the people were his friends.Q He 
was taken to the lodgings prepared for him by the careful 
Elector Frederick ; but even there he could have found little 
repose from the constant throng of visitors of high rank who 
pressed in to see him and cheer him with encouraging words. 
The next day, toward evening, the setting sun flashed his 
last rays through the great hall at Worms over an assemblage 
of the Emperor and princes of Germany. On a throne of 
state, clothed in regal robes, a collar of pearls around his neck, 
the insignia of the Golden Fleece glittering on his breast, sat 
the youthful and impassive Charles. Every eye in the splen- 
did assembly had been turned with eager interest to his grave, 
young face, for to his narrow intellect was committed the de- 
cision of a cause that involved the destiny of ages. On his 
right sat a dignified array of the electoral bishops of the em- 
pire.^) Each was a lesser pope, a spiritual and temporal lord, 
the firm opponent of heresy, the persecutor of the just. The 
bishops in gorgeous attire, their red and blue robes bordered 
with ermine, with all the imposing decorations of their order, 
assumed the highest places next to their imperial lord. On 
the left hand of the emperor the temporal electors, mighty 
warriors, and imperious rulers had their seat. They, too, wore 
robes bordered with ermine, and glittered with diamonds and 
rubies ; but the lustre of their almost regal power and ancient 
state was more imposing than any external pomp. Among 
them was seen the calm, firm countenance of Frederick, Elect- 
or of Saxony. On lower seats were gathered six hundred 
princes, lords, and prelates. There were fierce Dominicans 
from Spain, with dark, menacing eyes, the sworn extirpators 
of heresy. ( 3 ) There were brave German knights, renowned 
for valiant or cruel deeds, seamed with the scars of battle. 
There were jurisconsults in black; monks with cowl and 

C) Walch, xxiv., p. 463 ; xv., p. 2192. Luther's own account of his jour- 
ney. 

( 2 ) See list of persons at the Diet. Walch, xv., p. 2227. 

( 3 ) The Spaniards always boasted that there was no heretic in all Spain. 
See Muerte de Diaz, Keformistas Antiq. Esp., vol. xx. When Alfonso Diaz 
assassinated his heretic brother, his couutrymen approved the act. 



THE DIET OF WORMS. 95 

shaven heads; abbots, orators, and priests. There a vast as- 
sembly of all whom Germany had been accustomed to fear 
and to obey awaited in stern expectation the approach of an 
excommunicated monk. But the spectacle without was far 
more imposing ; it was a triumph of the mind. Every roof, 
tower, or convenient place was covered with people waiting to 
see Luther pass. A great multitude had gathered to devour with 
eager eyes the form and features of one whose humble brow and 
shaven head were made illustrious by the coronal of genius. 

So dense was the throng that Luther was obliged to go 
through gardens and private ways in order to reach the Diet. 
As he entered the magnificent assembly, he heard friendly 
voices on all sides bidding him godspeed. He pressed 
through the crowd ; he stood in the presence of the emperor. 
Every eye was turned away from Charles and fixed upon the 
humble monk ; he seemed confused by the scrutiny of the 
princely multitude, and his voice, when the proceedings began, 
was faint and low. Little was done at the first meeting; 
Luther was required to admit that he was the author of the 
writings published under his name, and to recant his heresies. 
By the advice of his counsel, Schurf, he asked for time to re- 
ply to the demand. The assembly broke up, to meet again 
the next day ; and the emperor, deceived by Luther's modest 
bearing, said to his attendants, " That man will never make 
me a heretic." In his old age, Charles V. was suspected of 
having adopted the opinions of the reformer whom in his 
youth he had despised. That evening Luther's room was 
again filled with princes and nobles, who came to press his 
hand and congratulate him upon his courageous bearing. He 
passed the night in prayer, and sometimes was heard playing 
upon a lute. But the next afternoon, about six o'clock, when 
torches had been lighted in the great hall and flashed upon 
the glittering jewels and stern countenances of the assembled 
diet, Luther arose, in the conscious pride of commanding elo- 
quence and a just cause, to defend the Kef ormation. He was 
assailed and interrupted by the constant assaults of his oppo- 
nent ; he replied to every charge with vigor and acuteness ; he 
spoke with a full flow of language, whether in German or Lat- 



96 LEO AND LUTHER. 

in.Q "Martin Luther," said the imperial counselor, "yester- 
day you acknowledged the authorship of these books. Do you 
now retract or disown them ?" Luther fixed his inspired eyes 
upon the emperor and the long array of dignitaries around 
him, and replied :( 2 ) " Most serene emperor, illustrious princes, 
most clement lords, I claim your benevolence. If in my re- 
ply I do not use the just ceremonial of a court, pardon me, 
for I am not familiar with its usages. I am but a poor monk, 
a child of the cell, and I have labored only for the glory of 
God." For two hours he spoke upon conscience and its priv- 
ileges, of its superiority to the claims of popes or councils, of 
the right of private judgment, of the supremacy of the Script- 
ures. The assembly listened with eager interest to his won- 
derful voice as it rose and fell in natural cadences, reflecting 
the varied novelty of his thoughts. The honest German 
princes heard with pride and joy an eloquence which they 
could scarcely understand. Erick of Brunswick sent him a 
tankard of wine through the press of the crowd. ( 3 ) "How 
well did our Doctor Luther speak to-day !" said the calm Elect- 
or Frederick, in a moment of unusual enthusiasm. But to 
the emperor and his papal followers Luther had spoken in 
vain. They said the monk was imbecile ; they did not know 
what he meant when he appealed to conscience and the right 
of private judgment. Meantime the torches were burning 
low in the great hall, and night gathered around the assembly. 
Luther's enemies pressed upon him with new violence; they 
commanded him to retract his heresies in the name of the 
Pope and the Church ; they threatened him with the punish- 
ment of the heretic. Then the reformer, once more confront- 
ing the hostile emperor, the persecuting bishops, the frowning 
Spaniards, and the papal priests, said, in a bold and resonant 
voice : " Unless, your majesty, I am convinced by the plain 
words of the Scriptures, I can retract nothing. God be my 
help. Here I take my stand." ( 4 ) 

C) Walch, xv v p. 2231. ( 2 ) Id. 

C) Audin, ii., p. 129. Ranke, Ref, i., p. 538. 

( 4 ) Ranke, Ref., i., p. 536. I translate the meaning rather than the exact 
words. 



LUTHER COXDEMXED. 97 

It was the voice of awakening reason ; the bugle - note of 
modern reform. Never since the days of the martyrs and 
the apostles had that noble sound been heard. Never had 
the right of private judgment been so generously asserted; 
never had the apostolic doctrine of conscience been so dis- 
tinctly proclaimed. Luther's bold words have since that time 
been ever on the lips of good, great men. Latimer and Cran- 
mer repeated them in the midst of the flames. Hampden 
and Sidney followed in his path. The freemen of Holland 
and America caught the brave idea. The countless victims 
of the Inquisition, the martyred foes of tyranny, the men who 
died for human liberty at Gettysburg or Bunker Hill, a War- 
ren or a Lincoln, have said in their hearts as they resolved 
on their path of duty, " God be my help. Here I take my 
stand." 

Luther left the assembly, resolved never to enter it again. 
He was now in great danger of his life. The Spaniards had 
hissed him as he left the diet ; he heard that the papal agents 
were urging the emperor to violate his safe -conduct and try 
him for his heresy. Nor would Charles have hesitated a mo- 
ment to destroy the reformer and gratify the Pope, had he not 
been held in check by the menacing array of German princes 
and knights. They, at least, felt that it was Germany, not 
Luther, that had been on trial at the Diet of Worms. They 
declared that if the reformer were burned, all the German 
princes must be burned with him. Q The knights and the 
peasants formed a secret league to defend Luther; and the 
emperor and his corn-tiers trembled in the midst of the ex- 
cited throng. He was suffered to leave the city unharmed. 
A sentence of condemnation, however, was forced through the 
assembly ; he was placed under the ban of the empire, togeth- 
er with all his friends and adherents ; his works ordered to 
be burned; and a severe censorship of the press was estab- 
lished, to prevent the publication in future of any heretical 
writings. But Luther was now hidden in his Patmos, con- 
cealed from friends and foes.( 2 ) As he was traveling cheer- 
ed Eauke, Ref., L, p. 538. ( 2 ) Walch, xv., p. 2327. 



98 LEO AND LUTHER. 

fully toward Wittenberg, defiant of both emperor and Pope, 
in a thick wood near Eisenach, he was set npon by a band of 
armed men with visors down, who carried him away to the 
grim castle of Wartburg, where he remained in a friendly im- 
prisonment nntil the danger was over. It was a prudent de- 
vice of the sagacious Elector Frederick. 

Once more, in December, 1521, Rome rejoiced over the 
death of a Pope; once more the Cardinal Camerlengo had 
risen from his bended knees to proclaim the certainty of the 
event. Again the great bell on the Capitol tolled heavily, 
and riot and disorder reigned in the sacred city. Leo was 
dead. An inscrutable mystery hangs over the last days of 
his life, and it is still in doubt whether the poisonous draught 
which his cardinals had prepared for him in the opening of 
his reign did not finally reach his lips. His people, impover- 
ished by his excesses, exulted in his death. " Oh, Leo," they 
cried, " you came in like a fox ; you ruled like a lion ; you 
died like a dog !" Posterity has been more favorable to his 
memory, and men of intellect have ever looked with sympa- 
thy upon that graceful pontiff who was the friend of Erasmus 
and Raffaello, and who, if he had lived in a less corrupt at- 
mosphere, might have yielded to the reforms of Luther. But 
the Golden Age of Leo X. is chiefly memorable as the peri- 
od when the magnificent Church of the Middle Ages began 
swiftly to wane before the rising vigor of the Church of the 
Reformation. 



LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

A Spanish cavalier, who was gallantly defending Pampeluna 
against the French, fell wounded in both legs by a cannon- 
shot. In one he was struck by the ball, in the other by a 
splinter of stone, and his agonizing wounds were destined to 
be felt, in their consequences, like the concussions of an earth- 
quake shock, in every part of the earth.Q They were the 
cause of many an auto-da-fe in Italy, and of a persecution 
worse than that of Diocletian in Spain. They aided in rousing 
the Netherlands to revolt, and in awakening the patient Hol- 
landers to heroic deeds. They made Holland free. They 
created the wonderful Dutch navy that swept the Spaniards 
from the seas, and made the East India trade retreat from 
Lisbon to Amsterdam. They led to the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew, the death of Mary Queen of Scots, the Spanish 
Armada, the Gunpowder Plot. They disturbed the New 
World, gave rise to many deeds of self-denial and piety, and 
many horrible crimes and woes. They were felt in distant 
Russia. They aroused the Poles against the Russians, and ex- 
cited a fierce war in which Poland inflicted injuries upon its 
feeble neighbors that have scarcely yet been expiated in seas 
of blood. They spread their fatal influence over China, and 
stirred that vast empire with a violent impulse. They were 
felt in Ethiopia and Hindostan, in Canada and Brazil ; they 
gave rise, in fact, to the company of the Jesuits. 

The wounded cavalier was Ignatius Loyola. He* was a 
brave Spanish nobleman, descended from a house of the high- 
est rank, and his youth had been passed at the court of Ferdi- 
nand the Catholic, in the society of the proudest grandees of 

C) Maffseus, Ignati Vita, i., p. 2. Ranke, Hist. Popes, i. } p. 56. Crdti- 
neau-Joly, Hist. Comp. de J6sus, i., p. 14. 



100 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

Spain. Q His literary education seems to have been neglect- 
ed. At thirty-three he could do little more than read and 
write. But he was no doubt familiar with all courtly exer- 
cises. He was a graceful page, a gallant cavalier. His dress 
was splendid, his armor rich with gems and gold; and al- 
though he was the youngest of thirteen children, he seems to 
have possessed sufficient wealth to live in elegance and ease. 
At his ancestral castle of Loyola, not far from the Pyrenees, 
or at the court of the Catholic King, the young noble had been 
trained in the school of St. Dominic, and in the most rigid 
rules of loyalty and faith. He had a becoming horror of her- 
esy and freedom. He seems, however, to have been a dutiful 
son, an affectionate brother ; and although his youth may have 
been marked by some trace of the gay license of the age, yet 
he lived in comparative purity. As became a grandee of 
Spain, he was a soldier. He entered the army of Charles Y. 
and fought bravely in defense of his native land, and the un- 
cultivated but ardent noble was always in the front of danger. 
If the literary element was wanting to his nature, Loyola 
still possessed a vigorous and fertile fancy. He was never 
weary of reading "Amadis de Gaul," or the massive ro- 
mances that fed the imagination of his chivalrous age. His 
mind was full of the impossible feats of knighthood, of con- 
quests in pagan lands, and the triumphs of the crusaders and 
of the Cross. His strong ambition had been fired by the fa- 
bled deeds of chivalry ; he longed, no doubt, to become as fa- 
mous as Amadis, and to crush the hated infidel like the pala- 
dins of Charlemagne. He had already chosen as his mistress 
a fair princess, whose colors, with true chivalric devotion, he 
was pledged to uphold in tilt or tournament ; and although 
his suit does not seem to have prospered, for he was a bach- 
elor of thirty-one, yet he was full of love as well as of ambi- 
tion. In person he was of middle stature, strong, and well- 
formed ; his complexion was a deep olive ; his nose aquiline, 
his eyes dark and flashing ;( 2 ) and his imperious will had been 

C) Maffseus, L, p. 1. Daurignac, i., p. 40, who abridges Cr6tineau-Joiy. 
( 2 ) Maffseus, iii. ; p. 14 : " Statura fuit modica." He was born 1491. 



LOYOLA'S WOUNDS. 101 

fostered in the labors of a military life. He was no doubt 
a strict disciplinarian, and had learned to drill his native sol- 
diery with the same precision with which he afterward organ- 
ized his priestly legions. And thus, glowing with those ckiv- 
alric fancies which Cervantes was not long after to dissipate 
with inextinguishable ridicule, the brave soldier threw himself 
into Pampeluna (1521), and made a hopeless resistance to the 
French invaders. The fortress fell, the wounded Loyola was 
taken prisoner ; but his conqueror, Andre de Foix, treated him 
with almost fraternal care, set him free, and had him carried 
tenderly to his home, which was not far from Pampeluna. 

Here, surrounded by his family and attended by skillful 
surgeons, he slowly recovered from his wounds. Yet his suf- 
ferings must have been terrible. He underwent a severe sur- 
gical operation with singular resolution. A piece of bone 
projecting from his knee was sawed off without calling forth 
a groan. He became almost a cripple ; he saw, perhaps with 
a mental agony deeper than the physical, that he could no 
longer hope to shine in the tournament or the courtly revel, 
or awaken by his grace and dexterity the admiration of his be- 
loved princess. As he grew better, his love for romances re- 
turned. He asked his brothers to bring him some of his fa- 
vorite authors. They brought him instead, as more appropri- 
ate, perhaps, to his condition, a " Life of Christ," and some 
lives of the saints. Pain, suffering, and disappointment had 
subdued Loyola's proud spirit ; the world had grown cold and 
dark ; but his ardent fancy now found a new field of enjoy- 
ment and consolation. The tales of religious heroism, of 
boundless humility, of divine labor in the cause of faith, led 
him away from the dreams of chivalry to an object still no- 
bler and more entrancing. Always an ardent enthusiast, ea- 
ger to emulate the examples of eminent men, a fond follower 
of renown, he now began to believe himself destined to a life 
of holy warfare. " Why can not I do what St. Dominic did ?" 
he exclaimed. "Why can not I be as St. Francis was?'^ 1 ) 
The uncultivated but chivalrous soldier, shut up in his sick- 

(*) Maffseus, i. ? p. 2. 



102 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

room, or slowly creeping along the sunny paths of Biscay, 
meditated with characteristic ardor on his project of a spirit- 
ual life. He would abandon the world and all its allurements, 
would fly from riches, power, and pride ; instead of his fair 
princess, he would have for his mistress a heavenly queen ; in- 
stead of an earthly tournament, he would shine in a spiritual 
warfare^ 1 ) His bride, like that of St. Francis, should be pov- 
erty. His enemies, like those of St. Dominic, heretics and 
devils. He would become a beggar and an outcast, the com- 
panion of lepers; he would clothe himself in rags, and go 
forth, like St. Francis and St. Dominic, to do battle for the 
Queen of Heaven. 

It had ever been the custom for the true knight -errant, as 
we read in "Don Quixote " and the books of chivalry, to de- 
vote himself by a solemn vigil before some holy shrine to his 
appointed work. In May, 1522, a richly dressed cavalier, clad 
in shining armor, appeared before the Benedictine monastery 
of Mont Serrat in Catalonia, and asked hospitality from the 
holy monks.( 2 ) He was taken to a cell, and when they in- 
quired his name, said he would be called " The Unknown Pil- 
grim." Three days he passed in making a general confes- 
sion of all his sins. Thus purified, he left the monastery un- 
observed; and having called to him a beggar from the high- 
way, gave him his rich dress, and in exchange clothed himself 
in the beggar's rags.( 3 ) He then gave away all his money to 
the poor. He put on a long, gray robe, bound by a thick cord 
around the waist, to which he attached his glittering sword and 
jeweled dagger, and thus attired fell down before the altar of 
the Holy Virgin, to keep his solemn vigil. He left his sword 
and poniard suspended at the shrine, and vowed thenceforth to 
wear alone the spiritual arms of poverty and devotion. Thus 
did the fanciful, impassioned Loyola fulfill the rites of chival- 
ry and faith. 

He was next seen wandering through the streets of Man- 
reza, a little village near Mont Serrat, so sordid in his dress, 

(*) Ranke, Hist. Popes, i., p. 67. ( 8 ) Maffaeus, i. ; pp. 3, 4. 

( 3 ) Pannoso cuidam ex infima plebe. 



LOYOLA A BEGGAB. 103 

so wild and haggard in appearance, that children mocked him, 
and men shrunk from him as from a madman. His compan- 
ions were beggars and outcasts. He wasted his manly strength 
in fearful penances and fasting, that brought him near to death. 
He courted contumely and shame. His chief employment was 
waiting upon the diseased poor, and performing for them the 
most repulsive offices. Like St. Francis, whom he evidently 
followed as a guide, he sought to abase himself to the lowest 
pitch of human degradation. Q He lived upon alms; he sold 
all his possessions, and made himself a penniless beggar. His 
home was a dark and noisome cave ; and here he composed 
his " Spiritual Exercises," which are related to have had a won- 
derful effect in converting his disciples and founding his or- 
der. His mind was now oppressed with terrible fancies ; he 
believed himself forever doomed ; ( 2 ) he was surrounded by 
demons who meditated his eternal ruin ; and often the half- 
maddened spirit longed for death, and was eager to find rest 
in suicide. Yet this fearful penance and this condition of 
wild hallucination have had their place in false religions as 
well as the true. The self-inflicted tortures of Ignatius and 
Francis of Assisi have often been far outdone by the Brah- 
man fanatics or Mohammedan dervishes. The Brahman im- 
pales himself on sharp iron hooks or flings himself beneath 
the car of Juggernaut to expiate imaginary guilt ; the der- 
vish often lives in squalid poverty, more hideous than that 
of Ignatius, throughout a whole life -time; and the follow- 
ers of Boodh have invented penances that excel the wild- 
est extravagances of the modern saint. As he advanced in 
knowledge, Loyola probably grew ashamed of his early ex- 
cesses, and discovered that squalor, filth, and endless fasting 
were no true badges of a religious life. He learned that re- 
ligion was designed to refine and purify rather than to debase 
human nature. 

In his cave at Manreza it is said that Loyola first conceived 



( 1 )Maffaeiis.i.,p.5w 

( 2 ) Maffseus, i., p. 6. His hair he left " impexum et squalidum ;" his nails 
grew long ; he was filthy. Satan came and tempted him. 



104 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

the design of founding his spiritual army. He saw in the 
heavens a vision of Babylon fighting against Jerusalem, of 
the demons of pride, wealth, and worldly corruption mar- 
shaling their hosts to assail the sacred city of humility ; and 
he resolved to place himself at the head of a saintly brother- 
hood and fly to the relief of the Cross. At this period his 
ideas were few, his knowledge limited. His education had 
been wholly military, and it is curious to observe how the tac- 
tics of the camp and the siege blended almost of necessity 
with the speculations of the uncultivated visionary .Q St. 
Francis and St. Dominic, who had been bred in civil life, 
were content with repeating in their institutions the monas- 
tic rules of Benedict and the East. They strove to reform 
mankind by silent asceticism, physical tortures, or touching 
appeals ; by the eloquence of the pulpit or of a meek and 
holy carriage. But Loyola, who was a soldier, accustomed to 
command, and conscious of the necessity of subordination, 
introduced into his society the strict discipline of the camp. 
As his plans were finally unfolded, the Jesuits became a com- 
pany ; their chief was called their general ; a perfect military 
obedience was enforced ; the inferior was held to be a • mere 
instrument in the hands of his superior ; the common soldier 
of the great spiritual army had no will, hardly a conscience, 
but that of his general at Rome. And thus, when the dim 
vision of the cave of Manreza was presented to the world, 
its chief novelty was the military rule of obedience. All 
other virtues were held to be without value unless joined to 
perfect submission to the will of another. Like a well-train- 
ed soldier, the Jesuit must first learn to obey. If he failed in 
this quality, the novice was rejected, the professed degraded, 
the lesser offenders scourged, sometimes to death. 

Thus, of the few ideas that Loyola possessed at Manreza he 
made practical use chiefly of those that were military ; he at 
least taught his followers obedience.( 2 ) And from this princi- 



(*) Constitutioiies Societatis Jesu, p. 53. 

( 2 ) See Ravignan, De l'Existeuce et de l'lnstitut des Jesuites, i., p. 91. 



THE STRENGTH OF JESUITISM. 105 

pie have sprung the power and the weakness, the mingled good 
and evil, of the order of the Jesuits. In obedience to the or- 
ders of an irresponsible head, the devoted and often sincerely 
pious priests have flung themselves boldly into savage lands ; 
have endured pain, misery, and want with heroic zeal ; have 
died in hosts in the jungles of India and hostile Ethiopian 
wilds ; have won the hearts of the savages of Brazil by their 
tender patience, and died with songs of holy joy amidst horri- 
ble torments in China and Japan. Yet, if we compare all the 
heroic sufferings of the Jesuits in the cause of obedience with 
those of the countless martyrs who have died for religious lib- 
erty in the dungeons of the Holy Office, on the battle-fields of 
Holland, or in the endless cruelties of Romish intolerance, they 
seem faint and insignificant; and where obedience has pro- 
duced one martyr, a thousand have fallen to attest their belief 
in Christianity. But if we turn to the dangerous side of obe- 
dience to an irresponsible and often corrupt head, we see how 
fatal was that weapon which the imprudent Loyola placed in 
the hands of unscrupulous churchmen. The unhappy Jesuits, 
bound by their oath of obedience, were soon made the instru- 
ments of enormous crimes. Their activity and blind devotion, 
their intelligence and secrecy, were qualities that peculiarly fit- 
ted them to become the emissaries and executioners of kings 
like Philip II. or popes like Caraffa. It is believed that the 
Jesuits were chiefly instrumental in producing the worst per- 
secutions in the Netherlands. A Jesuit plotted with Mary of 
Scotland the assassination of Elizabeth. Another strove to 
blow up James I. and the English Parliament with gunpow- 
der. The Jesuits were charged with being constantly on the 
watch to assassinate William of Orange and Henry of Na- 
varre. Anthony Possevin, a Jesuit, is stated by Mouravieff, 
the Church historian of Russia, to have taught the Polish Ca.th- 
olics to persecute the Greek Christians, and to have plunged 
Russia and Poland in an inexpiable war.Q Jesuits were con- 
stantly gliding over Europe from court to court, engaged in 
performing the mandates of popes and kings ; and, if we may 

( J ) Mouravieff, Hist. Russian Church, p. 122, trans. 



106 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

trust the records of history, the fatal vow of obedience was 
often employed by their superiors to crush the instincts of hu- 
manity and the voice of conscience. 

From his cave at Manreza Loyola now set out to assail her- 
esy and corruption. He was sincere, ardent, and resolute ; but 
the champion of the mediaeval faith soon found that he want- 
ed an important part of his mental armor. Amidst his visions 
and his spiritual exercises he had already discovered, in a mo- 
ment of natural good sense, that he could do nothing without 
knowledge. The age was learned and progressive. The re- 
formers of Germany and Switzerland were men of profound 
acquirements and intense application, while their Spanish op- 
ponent had heretofore done little more than dream. We next, 
therefore, find Loyola at Barcelona, when he was about thir- 
ty-three years of age, painfully endeavoring to acquire the el- 
ements of knowledge, in order to fit himself for the priesthood. 
He was forced to enter the lower classes of the college, and 
was condemned by his superiors to at least four years of pa- 
tient study. But he was already widely known as a saint and 
an enthusiast. He had already wandered to Rome and to Je- 
rusalem. The stately Spanish clergy, the Dominican or Fran- 
ciscan, looked with suspicion and dislike upon the wild and 
haggard visionary who consorted only with the miserable poor, 
and whose intense penances and self-chosen penury seemed a 
reproach to their own luxury and indifference. Loyola fell 
under the suspicion of the Inquisition, and was even accused 
of heresy ; he was persecuted and derided ; and, almost alone, 
a faithful and tender-hearted woman, Isabella Rosello, watched 
over his necessities and saved him from starving. She seems to 
have been his earliest disciple. She, at least, believed him in- 
spired from above, and saw, in moments of enthusiasm, rays of 
celestial glory playing around his wan brow.^) And long aft- 
erward, when Loyola guided the affairs of the Roman Church, 
he was embarrassed and somewhat annoyed by the persistent 
devotion of Isabella, who wished to found a company of female 
Jesuits under the supervision of the great chief himself. 

(*) Maffaeus, ii., p. 17. 



LUTHER AND LOYOLA. 107 

Luther and Loyola were contemporaries, and the latter the 
younger by eight years. Both were enthusiastic, ardent men, 
resolute and severe. Both had gone through religious expe- 
riences not altogether dissimilar; had struggled with doubt 
and terror, with remorse and shame. In their religious trials 
they fancied that they saw demons and spirits, and had held 
frequent contests with their great adversary. Both had labor- 
ed for purity of life, and had attained it. Both lived as far 
as possible above the allurements of the present. But their 
differences were still more striking than their resemblances. 
Luther was learned, accomplished, creative, poetical. He had 
been a profound student of the Scriptures ; he had marked ev- 
ery line, interpreted every thought ; he labored night and day 
to free his mind from the vain shadows of tradition, and to 
hear and attend alone to the voice of inspiration. For the 
teaching of man he cared nothing; he heard only the apos- 
tles and the Divine Preceptor ; and hence Luther had imbibed 
much of the benevolence and charity of the earlier Church. 
But Loyola was ever wrapped up in visions of the Middle 
Ages. Unlearned and dogmatic, he saw only the towering 
grandeur of Rome. He preferred tradition to the Scriptures, 
the teaching of the Pope to that of the Bible. One article of 
faith seemed to him alone important — the primacy of St. 
Peter. One text alone seemed to him the key of revelation ; 
one doubtful passage the only source of Christian life. To 
the primacy, therefore, Loyola vowed obedience rather than to 
the Scriptures ; to the enemies of the papacy he could assign 
only endless destruction. Hence, while Luther's doctrines 
tended to benevolence and humanity, those of his assailant 
must lead to persecution and war : the one was the herald of 
a gentler era, the other strove to recall the harsh traits of the 
days of Innocent and Hildebrand. 

Driven from his native land by the persecutions of the rival 
clergy, Loyola, in the year 1528, fled to Paris, and entered its 
famous university. His enthusiasm was somewhat sobered by 
time or knowledge ; but he still lived upon alms and with 
strict austerity. He was probably a diligent if not a very suc- 
cessful student. He was never learned, and his reading was 



108 LOYOLA AND TEE JESUITS. 

not of a kind likely to improve or enlarge his faculties. Com- 
pared with his eminent Protestant opponents, his knowledge 
was narrow, his mental powers obtuse, and the chief sonrce of 
his final success was his skill in organizing his followers and 
the controlling influence of his imperious will. . But at Paris 
he no doubt became more than ever convinced of the power 
of knowledge. Thrown amidst a busy throng of students, 
priests, professors, many of whom were Lutherans, or who 
shared in the advancing spirit of the age, he must have seen 
that learning was chiefly on the side of the new opinions, and 
that many of the disasters of the papal hierarchy were due 
to their own ignorance or indolence. He resolved, with his 
usual vigor, to create a new race of scholars, whose minds 
should be filled with the rarest stores of classic letters, but 
whose faith should be as firm and unswerving as his own. 
The dull soldierQ was to give rise to an infinite number of 
schools, colleges, and literary institutions whose teachers were 
to shine among the literary glories of the time, but who in 
matters of faith were to be chained and imprisoned by the fa- 
tal vow of obedience. His free schools were to be the chief 
agent in reviving the decaying vigor of the papacy. The chil- 
dren of every land who could be allured to the Jesuit schools 
were to be molded into active soldiers in his spiritual army. 
Every Jesuit was to obtain freely that education which Loy- 
ola so prized. By the free school he would defeat and beat 
back Protestantism. 

In Paris Loyola grew more rational. His spiritual agonies 
departed forever. Satan, he believed, was conquered, and he 
no longer meditated suicide. He was strong in the faith and 
in the certainty of success.Q His penances were still excess- 
ive, and he was surrounded by visions and prodigies, but they 
were all of a more hopeful aspect. But what was equally en- 
couraging, he now began to gather around him converts who 
were to form the germ of his spiritual army. His strong will 
and ardent convictions linked to him like a fascinating spell a 

( x ) Cre"tineau-Joly, i., p. 18, tlriuks be read men better tban books. 
( 2 ) Maffseus, i. ; p. 21. He already persecuted Lutherans. 



LOYOLA'S DISCIPLES. 109 

band of gifted young men who acknowledged him as their 
master. The first was Peter Lefevre, the son of a Savoyard 
goat-herd, intelligent and confiding. With him came finally 
his friend, Francis Xavier, a brilliant scholar, who at first had 
shrunk almost with aversion from the squalid Loyola, but who 
became at length the most devoted of his followers. Xavier 
was richjQ nobly born, famous, a favorite at the French court, 
learned, and full of worldly ambition ; but after three years of 
sturdy resistance he fell captive to the eloquent example of 
the bold enthusiast. Several Spaniards, also, joined Loyola — 
James Laynez, Bobaclilla, Rodriguez, and others ; and at last, 
in August, 1534, the young men met together in a subter- 
ranean chapel in Paris, and with solemn rites and holy vows 
pledged themselves to a religious life. Their design was to 
go to Jerusalem, and there devote themselves to the spiritual 
welfare of Christian pilgrims. Loyola's vision of Jerusalem, 
a reminiscence of chivalry, seems not yet to have faded from 
his mind, and his fancy still brooded over the woes of the 
Holy City. 

But the young band of enthusiasts were never destined to 
reach chat goal. We next find them stopped at Yenice 3 and 
here their missionary work began. The gay, rich city, luxuri- 
ous, licentious, and half heretic, was suddenly startled by the 
appearance of a wild and haggard band of reformers, emaciated 
with penances, ragged, and consorting with the wretched poor, 
who preached in the highways to wondering throngs, and 
whose imperfect pronunciation and broken language were 
often met with shouts of derision. Yet the Spanish mission- 
aries soon won attention by their fierce sincerity. ( 2 ) They 
taught perfect obedience to Eome, and astonished the half -her- 
etic Italians by the ardor of their faith. They proclaimed 
themselves the soldiers of a new army that was rising to de- 
stroy the enemies of the Church. They declared perpetual 
war against Lutheranism and every form of doubt : Catholic 
Spain was once more in arms to save the medieval Church. 
In 15 38, Loyola, with Laynez and Lefevre, went on foot to 

O Maffaeus. i., p. 22. ( 2 ) Id. Palniamque niartyrii studiose captareut. 



110 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

Rome to procure the assent of the Pope to his new order. 
On his way he entered a chapel near the Holy City and saw 
a vision. He was alone. His followers stood without. The 
Saviour descended ; the Holy Yirgin came to smile upon the 
impassioned Loyola ; a glory rested upon him ; and when he 
came from the little chapel his followers knew by his shining 
countenance that Heaven had chosen him as its champion. 

There are moments in the history of mankind when all 
seems doubt and indecision ; when men stand around amazed 
and not knowing what to do ; when the decision of a single 
powerful will affects the destiny of ages. Such a moment 
was the present. Paul III. sat upon the papal throne. He 
was a man of mild disposition, elegant, refined. He had been 
in his youth the friend of Leo X., and had imbibed the grace- 
ful tastes, the genial culture, of his accomplished predecessor. 
His manners were pleasing, his life somewhat licentious, but 
thus far cruelty and austerity had formed no part of his relig- 
ious policy. Under his pacific sway reform had made rapid 
progress, and already Italy and Rome itself were swiftly yield- 
ing to the purer teachings of the Protestant divines.Q Augus- 
tinian monks preached in the very heart of the papal dominions 
doctrines that differed little from those of Luther and Zuin- 
glius. In Parma or Faenza the reformers taught as openly 
and as successfully as in "Wittenberg or in London. Italy was 
filled with heretics to the papal rule; the splendid city of 
Venice was very nearly won over to the new principles ; per- 
secution for opinion's sake was scarcely known, and a hap- 
py tranquillity prevailed throughout the peninsula that gave 
liberty to thought and the promise of unexampled progress. ( 2 ) 
Paul III. was addicted to astrology, and believed more firm- 
ly in the decisions of the stars than in those of the Church. 
Gentle and not naturally cruel, had he possessed prudent 
counselors he might now have placed himself at the head of 
the reformers of Christendom, or at least have merited their 



C) Father Paul, Con. Trent, i., p. 101 ; Cre"tineau-Joly, i., p. 31. 
( 2 ) Cr6tineau-Joly, i., p. 35: "La crise du Protestantisme 6tait ; " etc. 
" It was," he thinks, " the most daugerous period." 



PAUL III. Ill 

forbearance. He seems not to have been without a con- 
science, and was at least sensible of his own imperfections, as 
well as of the corrupt condition of his Church. He even re- 
solved to reform his own life. He made some advances to- 
ward a reconciliation with Luther, which the reformer repelled 
as insincere ; and Paul now looked with helpless indifference 
upon the spread of Protestant opinions in Italy, and was per- 
haps not altogether certain of his own infallibility. 

But the moment was one that seemed to demand immediate 
action. Paul stood amidst the ruins of the mediaaval Church. 
More than half its ancient domain was in open revolt. En- 
gland had thrown off its supremacy, and Henry Till, was the 
head of a rival see. Germany and the North were in great 
part lost. Prance was filled with Protestants. Even Spain 
was tainted ; and now Italy itself, always rebellious, seemed 
about to join the ranks of the reformed kingdoms, and deny 
the authority of the Holy See. Two methods of action lay 
before the hesitating pontiff. He might either attempt to re- 
gain his supremacy by persecution, war, and bloodshed ; or he 
might win back the revolted nations by Christian gentleness, 
by a holy life and a sincere contrition. Q Had he pursued 
the latter course, what endless woes would have been pre- 
vented ! What fearful persecutions, what wild religious wars, 
what a long scene of human calamity! He might have re- 
strained the cruel arm of the savage Charles V., and his yet 
more barbarous son. He might have softened the brutal Hen- 
ry YIIL, and won the respect of Protestants in every land. 
There would have been no Massacre of St. Bartholomew, no 
slaughter of the just in Holland and the Netherlands, no 
Papal Inquisition ; and the Poman Church would have stood 
to-day free from those stains of blood-guiltiness which have 
made it in the past a reproach and a horror to Christen- 
dom. 

But Paul had no prudent advisers. The Holy College of 
Cardinals seem to have wanted both discretion and humanity ; 
while at this decisive moment the wild and haggard Spanish 

(*) Father Paul, i. ; p. 69. The Pope had already tried to reform his court. 



112 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

soldier, Loyola, wrapped in his visions and filled with his im- 
possible scheme of military rule and perfect obedience, enter- 
ed Rome. His coming probably determined the future fate 
of mankind. We have no means, indeed, of showing how far 
the counsels of the narrow visionary influenced the conduct 
of Paul III. and his cardinals ; but we know that the Jesuits 
very soon became the favorite advisers and instruments of the 
Pope, that they were his most trusted adherents, and that 
Loyola's theory and practice of perfect obedience to the Holy 
See at once won the heart of Paul. Accustomed only to a 
general insubordination, surrounded everywhere by clamorous 
reformers and Protestants who denied his authority, the pon- 
tiff no doubt heard with double satisfaction the sincere profes- 
sions of his new champion. By the year 1540, Loyola and 
his followers were supreme at Rome.Q The Pope authorized 
the formation of the new order, approved its constitutions ; 
and, in 1541, Ignatius, reluctant and modest, was installed as 
General of the Company of the Jesuits. The society occu- 
pied a house in the Piazza Morgana, and their numbers rapid- 
ly increased ; they preached with wild fervor in the churches 
and public squares ; their fierce enthusiasm subdued the minds 
of the Romans ; and it is related that they silenced an elo- 
quent rival preacher, an Augustinian monk, by having him 
tried and condemned for heresy. 

The future policy of the Roman Church was now decided 
upon. It was death to the heretic and the reformer. Paul 
no longer hesitated ; and, in 1542, he issued his bull creating 
the Papal Inquisition. No similar institution had ever exist- 
ed. The Spanish Inquisition had been comparatively narrow 
in its influence; the Dominicans had long ceased to torture 
German heretics at will. Persecution had for many years 
died out, and the doctrine of toleration was practically ap- 
plied in many lands. But now an Inquisition was suddenly 
erected which was to have its central seat at Rome, and which 
was to extend its influence wherever the papal power was 

( x ) Cr6tineau-Joly, i., p. 39 : "La benediction du ciel s'etendit sur les tra- 
vaux." 



THE ROMAN INQUISITION. 113 

acknowledged.^) At its head were placed six cardinals, who 
were to be the world's inquisitors. They were to exercise a 
special supervision over Italy, but were empowered to appoint 
inferior agents or deputies in all other countries, who were in- 
trusted with authority as absolute as their own. The Inquis- 
itors held in their hands the power of life and death. They 
were directed to be swift and decided in their action. No 
parley was to be held with the heretic. He was to be dis- 
patched at once. The fatal crime of honest doubt was to be 
punished with the rack and the stake. Death was the only 
punishment. He who read his Bible was to be burned. To 
read or study the Scriptures was the deadliest of crimes. To 
pray in secret, to preach, to meet together in religious assem- 
blies, to doubt the virtue of relics and holy sites, to question 
the authority of the Koman Church, to discuss religious topics, 
even to think heretical thoughts, were all held deserving of im- 
mediate death. The Papal Inquisition, indeed, was a declara- 
tion of war, murder, extermination, against all who refused to 
submit to the spiritual rule of the Roman Church : it was the 
invention of a malignant demon or of an insane fanatic. 

Caraffa and Toledo, two cardinals of the Dominican school, 
are said to have suggested the Inquisition to Paul ;( 2 ) yet it 
seems to have been the natural fruit of the austere lessons of 
Loyola. It would be vain to command obedience without 
possessing some means of enforcing it. By physical terrors 
alone could the belief in the primacy be sustained ; and Loyo- 
la, who had already aspired to a perfect tyranny over the in- 
tellect, who wished to crush every rising doubt and bring back 
his age to an implicit faith in the wildest delusions of the 
mediaeval Church, could hope to do so only by a general in- 
quisition. The Jesuit writers claim that he sustained the new 
measure by a special memorial, 3 and he evidently hailed it 
with a fanatical delight. His military education had made 
him familiar with bloodshed and violence ; he had been ac- 

O Kanke, Hist. Popes, i., p. 74 ; Bower, Popes, vii., p. 457. Naples re- 
pelled the inquisitors. 

( 2 ) Ranke, i., p. 74. ( 3 ) Id. 

8 



114 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

customed to inflict death for the slightest infraction of disci- 
pline; and he believed that the world of thought might be 
ruled by the same harsh tyranny with which he had once gov- 
erned a company of Spanish soldiers. A stern and unsparing 
fanatic, just escaped from the squalor of a hermit's cave, de- 
spising all that was pure and fair in life, and fed on visions, 
Loyola rejoiced in the blood of the saints ; and, with Caraffa 
and Toledo, his willing instruments, labored to make the 
Spanish Inquisition universal. 

The Inquisitors proceeded at once to their fearful work. 
Caraffa and Toledo, who were at the head of the six. procured 
some money from the papal treasury, almost its last resources, 
and hired a suitable house. They next purchased a supply of 
racks, chains, thumb-screws, and all the various instruments of 
torture. Q As economy was needful, they probably began in 
a very modest way. They provided fagots and pitch or sul- 
phur, yellow robes painted with demons, ropes and chains for 
the final catastrophe ; and soon men and women suspected of 
holding heretical opinions began to be suddenly missed from 
the streets of Rome. They had been seized upon by the as- 
sassins of the Holy Office ; they would never be seen again 
until they came forth bound and gagged to be laid on the 
fatal pyre. Very soon, while Loyola and his followers were 
preaching to horror-stricken throngs, the traditions of a bar- 
barous past, the smoke of many an auto-da-fe, began to rise 
over the ruins of Rome. The favorite scene of the horrid 
rite was in front of the- Church of Santa Maria. Here once 
more, as in the days of Nero, Christians died in horrible tor- 
ments to gratify a worse than pagan malice; and the pure 
and the good often fell ready and joyous victims to the rage 
of dissolute and savage priests. A universal horror settled 
upon Rome. The reformers fled in crowds to Naples or the 
North, or else concealed themselves, as in the days of Diocle- 
tian, in hideous retreats. The Franciscans were silenced, the 
Augustinians overawed, and no voice was heard in the Ro- 
man churches but that of the haggard Jesuits and brutal Do- 

(') Ranke, Hist. Popes, Inquisition, i., p. 74. 



TEE PAPAL MASSACRES. 115 

minicans, recounting their legends and celebrating the Mother 
of God.C) 

The massacres were repeated and enlarged in all the Italian 
cities. Everywhere the roads were tilled with terrified throngs 
of men, women, children, who, abandoning home, friends, and 
property, were flying for safety across the Alps. Swift in pur- 
suit came the Inquisitors, aided by the papal soldiery. They 
were charged to show no toleration to heretics, especially Cal- 
vinists. Eminent preachers, who had ventured to deviate in 
the slightest degree from the doctrine enforced by Loyola and 
his followers, were the peculiar objects of vengeance. Caelio, 
a noted reformer, had a narrow escape. He had waited until 
the officers came to seize him, but, being a large and powerful 
man, cut his way with a knife through the papal guards, and 
made his escape over the Alps. Every city was filled with 
terror, and the rival factions added to the horrors of civil 
strife by denouncing their enemies to the Inquisition. Yen- 
ice, rich, populous, and luxurious, was filled with German Lu- 
therans or native heretics, who, when they heard of the fatal 
persecution, hastened to make their way out of Italy. The 
roads and villages of Switzerland and Germany were soon 
beset by a multitude of exiles ; the rich and the noble suf- 
fered equally with the poor and the obscure. ( 2 ) Happy fami- 
lies were broken up and scattered ; the rich were reduced to 
penury ; the artisan driven from his factory, the farmer from 
his fields. But miserable was the fate of those who could not 
escape. They were hurried on board of two vessels and car- 
ried out to sea. Here a plank was placed from one ship to 
the other ; the Protestants were forced upon it, and then, the 
vessels being driven apart, the plank fell into the sea, and its 
hapless occupants sunk with it, calling to their Saviour for aid. 
It was said that no Christian could die in his bed in all Italy. 
Meanwhile the Jesuit missionaries hastened to the terrified 
cities, preached e7erywhere with triumphant vigor, and Lay- 
nez, Lefevre, and Bobadilla boasted that heresy was every- 
where extirpated by their eloquence. 

C) Ranke ; Inquisition, i., p. 74. ( 2 ) Id. 



116 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

It is painful, but useful, to review these scenes of human 
folly and crime; for History is never so instructive as when 
she teaches us what to avoid. All Christians, whether Cath- 
olic or Protestant, would now probably unite in reprobating 
the Inquisition as established by Caraffa, Loyola, and Paul ; 
and few but will now admit that the present decline of the 
Roman Church is due to the unhappy counsels of those im- 
prudent advisers. The persecutor, in whatever form, is al- 
ways the enemy of himself, of his friends, and of the human 
race ; and Loyola, as the founder or patron of a system of re- 
ligious intolerance, displayed that fatal element in his nature 
for which none of his really remarkable qualities could atone. 
Cruelty, or that barbarous instinct which leads men to wound 
or destroy each other, is man's crowning vice ; the one which 
Christianity strives to eradicate by lessons of gentleness and 
]ove; which civilization abhors or contemns. As contrasted, 
therefore, with their chief opponent, the eminent reformers of 
that early age rise to a high and humane superiority. Lu- 
ther, although severe in doctrine, never encouraged persecu- 
tion. A single unhappy act of severity stains the career of 
the gifted Calvin. Zuinglius taught, from his Swiss mount- 
ains, universal toleration. Elizabeth professed a similar pol- 
icy, arid only departed from it when she believed that the 
Jesuits pointed the daggers that were aimed at her heart ; 
and it is probable that many Catholics of that unhappy age 
looked with shame and abhorrence upon the crimes of their 
rulers. 

From the squalid cave at Manreza was to come forth a still 
more wonderful inspiration than even the Holy Office itself — 
no less than the reconstruction of the Church of Rome. Loy- 
ola was to rebuild the shattered fabric, to renew its mediaeval 
towers and battlements, to crowd its walls with a shining ar- 
ray of spectral and saintly warriors, and to make it the gor- 
geous reflex of his own teeming fancy. Since the Council of 
Trent the Roman Church has been the representative of the 
faith of the hermit of Manreza. The genius of Loyola pre- 
sided at Trent, and the faith of that last great Romish coun- 
cil was determined by the' eloquence and learning of Laynez, 



THE "SPIBITUAL EXERCISES." 117 

Salmeron, and Le Jay.Q But the Jesuits spoke only what 
they believed to be the meaning of their spiritual chief at 
Rome. They had sworn a perfect obedience to Loyola; in 
him they heard the voice of Heaven ; in his " Spiritual Exer- 
cises " they had sought salvation ; they were passive tools in 
the hands of the master; in him they saw a god. And hence 
the faith which the three Jesuits preached with modest elo- 
quence and varied learning at the famous council, and which 
was to become the law of the Roman Church, may be found 
in the " Spiritual Exercises " and the final " Letter on Obedi- 
ence."( 2 ) 

The faith which Loyola would impart to his disciples was 
altogether a pictorial one. It was a series of splendid or touch- 
ing visions which they were to endeavor to realize with an en- 
trancing clearness. The novice was instructed to withdraw 
himself to some cell or solitude, and here, with fasting, severe 
flagellation, and silent meditation, to crush every worldly im- 
pulse. He was now in a condition for the highest spiritual 
exercise, and he was to see in imagination the Holy Virgin and 
her sacred Son standing before him and conversing with him 
upon the vanity of the world. ( 3 ) He was next to image to 
himself the vast fires of hell, and the souls of the lost shut up 
in their eternal dungeons. He was to listen to their lamenta- 
tions and their blasphemies, to smell the smoke of the brim- 
stone and the fire, to touch the consuming flame itself. Now 
kneeling, now lying prone on his face, and now on his back, 
faint with fasting and half crazed for want of sleep, torn by 
frequent scourging, his eyes ever streaming with tears, the 
novice was to seek for that grace and pardon which came only 
from unsparing penance. ( 4 ) Then he was to bring before his 
mental eye the outline of the Gospel story. He saw the Vir- 
gin sitting on a she-ass, and, with Joseph and a poor maid-serv- 
ant, setting out for Bethlehem. He was to realize the weary 
journey of the travelers, to strive to see the cavern or hut of 

(*) Daurignac, i., p. 40 ; Ranke, i., pp. 72, 73. 

( 2 ) Cr^tineau-Joly, i., pp. 249,255. 

( 3 ) Exer. Spirit., I. Hebd. : " Colloquium primum fit ad Dominam nos- 
tram," etc. ( 4 ) Id. 



118 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

the nativity. ( x ) Every event in the life of the Saviour was to 
be painted to his fancy, and every sense was to lend its aid 
to complete the accuracy of the picture. He would hear the 
groans of the garden, touch the bleeding wounds, taste the bit- 
ter gall. One of his own most striking visions Loyola dwells 
upon with unusual fondness. On the fourth day of the sec- 
ond week of the spiritual exercises the novice was to see the 
battle of Babylon and Jerusalem. He was to imagine a bound- 
less plain around the Sacred City, covered with hosts of the 
pure and the good, in whose midst stood the Lord Christ, the 
commander of the whole army. Upon another — the Babylo- 
nian plain — he would see the captain of sinners, horrible in 
aspect, sitting in a chair of fire and smoke, and marshaling his 
legions for an assault upon the Church.( 2 ) 

Such were the visions the novice was to summon before 
him. The spiritual exercises were divided into four weeks, 
and every day and hour had its appropriate duty. But no 
study of the Scriptures is enjoined ; and Loyola seems to have 
scarcely been familiar with the Sermon on the Mount, or the 
practical wisdom of St. Paul. His whole fancy was apparent- 
ly filled with the vision of his heavenly mistress, who had so 
often vouchsafed to appear to him in person and smile upon 
him benignantly, and whose champion he had so early avowed 
himself ; and he evidently believed in his own inspiration, and 
felt in himself a prophetic fervor. He, perhaps, thought him- 
self above even the Church. But with exceeding discretion 
he inculcated upon his disciples perfect obedience to the Ko- 
man See. He taught a submission so thorough to every de- 
cision or intimation of the Church as was never known before 
to saint or hero. If the Church should say that black is 
white, says Loyola, we must believe her, for she speaks the 
voice of God.( 3 ) Thus did the unlearned enthusiast prostrate 
all his mental faculties before that shadowy vision, the medi- 
eval Church, whose limits and powers no one could define, 

O Exer. Spirit., II. Hebd. ( 2 ) Id. 

( 8 ) Exer. Spirit., Req. Aliquot : " Si quid, quod ooulis uostris apparet 
album, nigrum ilia esse defiinerit, debemus itidem, quod nigrum sit, pro- 
nuiitiare." 



TEE COUNCIL OF TRENT. 119 

whose utterances were confessedly confused and contradicto- 
ry, which to one-half the Christian world seemed to have de- 
parted wholly from the simple faith of the Gospel, and whose 
luxury, license, and pride were a gross parody upon religion 
and truth. Yet Loyola, who professed and even practiced 
humility, self- denial, and a spotless purity, was now, by a 
strange contradiction, to become the champion of an institu- 
tion whose corruption even popes and cardinals confessed. 

The Council of Trent opened with imposing ceremonies^ 1 ) 
It was designed to be the general assembly of all Christendom. 
It was filled with the eminent dignitaries of the Catholic 
world, with bishops and archbishops, with the cardinal legates 
and two Jesuits as representatives of the Papal See, with 
the delegates of the emperor and all the Catholic sovereigns. 
Yet, after all, it was but a feeble and fragmentary gathering 
compared with those magnificent assemblies which had been 
summoned together by the Roman emperors, where the Patri- 
archs of the East, the legates of Rome, and the representatives 
of Gaul, Africa, and Spain met to decide, with clamorous con- 
troversy, the opinions of the early Church. The Council of 
Trent had small right to call itself Ecumenical. .One -half 
the Christian world shrunk with fear or horror from the he- 
retical assembly. The whole Eastern Church, with the great 
Patriarchates of Constantinople and Moscow, denied its au- 
thority. England and Germany, once the favored children 
of Rome, had thrown off its allegiance. The most eminent 
scholars of the time derided the claim of the fragmentary 
gathering to decide the opinions of the faithful. No Protest- 
ant dared venture to the hostile assembly, lest he might share 
the fate of Jerome or Huss; and Luther and Melanchthon, 
the reformers of Geneva and of London, united in opposing 
the assumption of a small faction of the Christian world to 
control the Universal Church. The council, they said, was 
only a factious assembly.( 2 ) It was only designed to spread 
the Inquisition, to confirm the power of the papacy. It was a 



C) Piatti, Storia de' Pontefici, x., p. 127 ; Sarpi, Con. Trid, 
( 2 ) Sarpi, i., p. 97 at sey. 



120 LOYOLA AND TEE JESUITS. 

band of persecutors into whose hands no Christian could trust 
himself ; its theology was corrupt and unscriptural ; its poli- 
cy that of cruelty and persecution ; it was an assembly of the 
servants and adherents of the antichrist at Rome. 

Spain, Italy, and Austria were the nations chiefly represent- 
ed at the Council of Trent.Q They were the lands of the In- 
quisition and the Jesuits. In all of them free opinion had late- 
ly been extirpated or repressed by the most horrible cruelties ; 
and it was certain that if the people of those bleeding nations 
had been allowed to send delegates to the council — if, as in 
early and better ages, the popes and bishops had been elected 
by a popular vote — the assembly would have condemned per- 
secution and opened wide its doors to the pure and good of 
every land. Once more there might have been an undivided 
Christendom ; once more the Sermon on the Mount might 
have pervaded civilization. ( 2 ) But the Papal Church was con- 
trolled by an autocrat at Rome who would abate none of his 
tyranny; by a corrupt aristocracy of bishops and cardinals 
who were dependent upon the papacy ; and by Loyola, who, 
from his flourishing college, silent and grave, ruled his gift- 
ed followers by their vows of passive obedience. More than 
three centuries have passed since the Council of Trent. And 
now once more a summons from Rome calls the faithful ad- 
herents of the absolute tyranny of a pope to assemble and dis- 
cuss the critical condition of the ancient see.( 3 ) The Jesuits 
still rule at Rome ;. the powerful order has become the last 
stay of mediaeval Christianity ; but the people have long since, 
in every land, rebelled against the teachings of Loyola. Spain, 
hallowed or shamed by his nativity, has abolished the whole 
mediaeval system, and invites free thought and speech to take 
shelter within its borders. Italy, which, when the Council of 
Trent was sitting, was crushed by the Inquisition into a hor- 
rible repose that was to check her progress for centuries, now 
defies the papal authority, confiscates the property of the 

C) Daurignac, i., p. 53. 

( 2 ) Le Plat, Acta Con. Trid., vii., part ii., p. 2, describes the slow gather- 
ing of the council. 

( 3 ) This was written in 1869, before the Council met. 



THE JESUITS Al TRENT. 121 

Church, and would gladly see both Pope and Jesuit take flight 
to some more congenial land. Austria takes part in the gen- 
eral revolt against the theory of passive obedience ; and if the 
people of those three great Catholic powers were now permit- 
ted to elect bishops and popes, and to select their delegates to 
the approaching council, it is probable that the whole mediaeval 
system would be swept away, and the tyranny of corrupt and 
irresponsible churchmen be forever broken. Once more there 
might be an undivided Christendom, in feeling if not in form. 
The Council of Trent had been summoned by Paul to meet 
in 1542, but it did not finally assemble until 1545.( a ) It contin- 
ued to hold its sessions until 1552, when it was prorogued, and 
did not meet again for ten years. In 1562 it assembled once 
more, and continued for nearly two years, when it was finally 
dissolved. Laynez, Salmeron, and Le Jay were the busiest of 
its members. In one chief element of religious discussion the 
Council was singularly deficient; no one of the bishops had 
read the fathers, or was able to trace to its sources the origin 
of their traditional Church. The prompt Laynez offered to 
supply the general want of learning. Night and day, it is 
said, he toiled with enormous labor over the ponderous works 
of the authoritative fathers ; his health gave way, and the pa- 
tient and ignorant assembly adjourned until he had recovered; 
and at length the hasty theologian professed himself perfect in 
his task. He was ready with reference and quotation to prove 
the doctrine of penance or to refute the most moderate of the 
reformers. Salmeron was equally active, and, in Father Paul's 
opinion, his assumed modesty often concealed an extraordinary 
impertinence.( 2 ) The moderate party in the council, led by 
the tolerant Pole, would have been glad to have refined and 
purified the Church ; but they were overawed by the Jesuits. ( 3 ) 
The most extreme measures were adopted; the dreams of 
Loyola were received as revelations from Heaven. It was de- 

( J ) Acta Con. Trid., Le Plat. In January, 1546, only twenty bishops had 
arrived to represent the Universal Church. Vol. vii., part ii., p. 10. 

( 2 ) Sarpi, 1562, i., p. 19 ; Crdtineau-Joly, i., p. 261. 

( 3 ) Salmeron's speech, Acta Con. Trid., i., p. 93, shows his vigor and bit- 
terness. 



122 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

cided that tradition was of equal authority with the Scriptures ; 
that flagellations and self-inflicted tortures were acceptable to 
God ; that the visions of the Queen of Heaven were proofs of 
a divine mission ; that the cup should be forbidden to the lai- 
ty ; that passive obedience was due to the Roman See. After 
a weary session of eighteen years, in the midst of terrible wars 
and constant scenes of horror, the unlucky assembly separated, 
followed by the derision of the Protestants and the contempt 
of the more thoughtful Catholics. Queen Elizabeth called it 
a popish conventicle ; and only the papal party and the Jesu- 
its obeyed the schismatic council. 

Loyola, in the mean time, had seen his little society grow to 
vast proportions. Nine members, in addition to himself, had 
formed the whole company of the Jesuits in 1540, and now 
the numbers had increased to thousands. Persecuted by the 
Dominicans and Benedictines, feared and hated by the clergy 
and the bishops, the wonderful brotherhood spread over South- 
ern Europe, and filled the cities with its colleges and schools. 
The constitution of the society is a perfect despotism^ 1 ) The 
general has an absolute control over every one of the mem- 
bers ; his voice is that of Heaven.( 2 ) The whole body of the 
Jesuits is divided into four orders; but of these only the 
highest, composed of the professed or advanced, have any share 
in the election of their chief. They form a severe aristocracy, 
few in number, and holding a supreme control over the lower 
orders. These consist of the Coadjutors, the Scholars, and 
the Novices. They are bound by their vows to obey their su- 
periors in all things, and are early taught by severe tasks and 
the most degrading compliances to sacrifice wholly the sen- 
timent of personal self-respect. The whole society forms a 
well -disciplined army, governed by a single will, and every 
member of the immense brotherhood, in whatever part of the 
earth he may be found, looks to the central power at Rome 
for the guidance of all his conduct. In this principle lies the 

(*) See Constitutiones Societatis Jesu, 1558 ; printed at London, 1838. 

( 2 ) Const., p. 68. The general, locum Dei teuenti, is supreme. See Ra- 
viguan, i., p. 91 : " Je vois Dieu, j'entends Jesus-Christ, lui-meme dans mou 
superieur." 



GREAT WEALTH OF TEE JESUITS. 123 

wonderful vigor that has made the Jesuits, for more than three 
centimes, one of the chief powers of the earth. Implicit obe- 
dience is the source of their unity and strength. 

The Jesuits are supposed to live upon alms. But their col- 
leges are all richly endowed ; and in the lapse of ages their 
wealth must have accumulated to an enormous amount. Their 
colleges are found in every part of the world. Q They usual- 
ly possess costly buildings, and all the marks of prosperous op- 
ulence. They profess to teach gratuitously ; they expend large 
sums in charity ; they educate countless scholars in the strict- 
est observances of the mediaeval faith ; and notwithstanding 
his vow of poverty, it is possible that no other potentate has 
controlled more extensive revenues than the General of the 
Jesuits at Eome. Conscious of power, and perhaps elated by 
success, Loyola, in the close of his life, showed traces of vanity 
and presumption. He was fond of boasting of his own suffer- 
ings and his own familiarity with the rulers of the skies. He 
was ever imperious and visionary, and now the insane thought 
seems to have entered his mind that he was the brother of 
Christ.Q At night he was often visited by demons who shook 
him in his bed, and his loud outcries would awaken the broth- 
er who slept in an adjoining cell. His health was always fee- 
ble, and he often suffered agonies of pain. He was at times 
probably insane. Yet he would soon recover again, and di- 
rect all his faculties to the government and extension of his 
mighty army, which was now doing battle for the papacy in 
every land. 

It formed a vast missionary society, whose gifted members, 
eager for the crown of martyrdom, plunged boldly into un- 
known lands, and preached to wondering heathendom the glo- 
ries of the Queen of Heaven. Loyola's design had always 
been to convert the world to the Eoman faith. He would 
make amends for the loss of England and the hardy Xorth 
by the conquest of India or Japan, and teach the uncultivated 

( a ) See Const., Pars Sexta; Dauriguac, L, p. 35. They began at once to 
found colleges. 

( 2 ) Steiumetz, Hist. Jesuits, i., p. 295 ; Cretineau-Joly. i., p. 32. 



124: LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

savages of Canada or Brazil to chant the praises of the Bless- 
ed Mary. Thus the splendid fabric of the Koman Church 
would be renewed in the rich streets of Delhi, in the teeming 
cities of China, or the wild woods of the untutored West, and 
the vows of passive obedience sink deep in the bosom of the 
gentle races of the Eastern lands. How should the faith of 
the simple savage put to shame the hardy heretics of Ger- 
many ! How must schismatic Europe blush when it saw Asia 
bowing at the shrine of Mary ! He hastened to put his grand 
design into execution, and the brilliant and impassioned Xa- 
vier was chosen as the first missionary to the golden East.Q 
Xavier had been one of those early disciples who had knelt 
with Loyola in the subterranean shrine at Paris, and who had 
abandoned wealth, fame, and regal favors for the companion- 
ship of his outcast master. He was pure and gentle, an indif- 
ferent scholar, a graceful and persuasive teacher. He wanted 
the deep reading of the iron Laynez, or the busy impertinence 
of the active Salmeron ; and Loyola, thoughtless of the friend 
in the requirements of the order, sent forth the faithful dis- 
ciple to be the martyr and the apostle of the East. Xavier' s 
career, according to his numerous biographers, was a wonder- 
ful scene of success. Millions of heathen yielded to his elo- 
quence.Q All Hindostan seemed to receive him with delight. 
He worked a thousand miracles ; and when language failed to 
convert a heathen nation, he brought a dead man to life, and 
they yielded at once. He could even impart his miraculous 
powers to others, and had formed a band of boys who were 
miracle-workers when the weary saint had ceased. Against 
wicked heathen who resisted his appeals he sometimes sent 
forth armies, who gained victory with great slaughter of the 
foe ; and sometimes he destroyed his enemies by a silent mal- 
ediction. Europe was filled with the fame of the exploits of 
the inspired missionary, and it was rumored that the whole 
East would soon bow to the Romish sway. But his success 
proved to be exaggerated or transient. Xavier had entered 

C) Butler, Lives of Saints, xii., p. 32. 

( 2 ) Butler, xii., p. 34 ; Dauriguac, i., p. 51 ; Cr6tineau-Joly, i., p. 476. 



XAVIEB IN THE EAST. 125 

India when the Portuguese were everywhere conquering or 
desolating that unhappy land ; the subject people yielded to 
the command of one of the victorious race, and were bap- 
tized. Q They kissed the crucifix of the missionary, they 
adored his pictures, and they chanted a " Hail Mary." But 
the converts were chiefly from the lowest and most corrupt 
of the Hindoos ; the transient impulse soon passed away, and 
they once more returned to their native idols. Xavier left 
India, weeping over the vices and the brutality of its people. 
The impassioned missionary next planned the spiritual con- 
quest of Japan, and came to that remarkable country under 
the protection of the Portuguese arms. Here, too, he seemed 
at first to obtain a wonderful triumph. The Japanese bowed 
devoutly in great multitudes before his pictures of Christ and 
the Holy Yirgin. He founded schools, planted churches, and 
three times a day his intelligent converts repeated their " Hail 
Mary " in groves once tenanted by Satan. Yet here, too, his 
miracles and his teaching had only a temporary influence. 
And at lengthQ the Apostle of the East, worn with toil and 
disappointment, died (1552) on a rocky isle on the coast of 
China, still, in his eager ambition, planning a missionary in- 
vasion into the land of Confucius and Boodh.Q One can not 
avoid contrasting the imperfect labors of the Jesuit Apostle 
of the East with those of him who stood on Mars Hill, or in 
the crowded streets of Rome ; who bore no images nor pict- 
ures ; who insisted upon no idolatrous observances ; who told 
no fanciful legends of the Virgin and the saints; but who 
pierced the hearts of the gifted Greeks and Romans by the 
plain words of gentleness, soberness, and truth. The sermons, 
the prayers, the letters, the example of the Apostle to the 
Gentiles founded a Church that shall live forever ; the pict- 
ures, the crucifixes, the legends, and medieval hymns of his 
spurious successor have faded swiftly from the mind of the 
idolatrous East. 
Meanwhile the Jesuit missionaries, with undoubted hero- 



(*) Daurignac, i., p. 51. ( 2 ) Butler, xii., p. 58; Cre'tiiiean-Joly, i. 7 p. 474. 
( 3 ) Cre'tineau-Joly, i. ; p. 494. 



126 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

ism, made their way into the dark places of the earth. They 
founded a nourishing settlement in Brazil that seemed for a 
long time full of delightful promise. Q They half converted 
the Japanese ; they ruled at Pekin, and made the Chinese ac- 
quainted with Western science ; they penetrated to Ethiopia ; 
they softened the savages of Canada and Illinois; and they 
proved their sincerity and heroism by a thousand arduous ex- 
ploits. Yet a similar ill fortune seemed to attend all their 
enterprises, and China, Japan, America, Ethiopia once more 
repelled with bitter hatred the oppressive sway of Rome. A 
multitude of pious and earnest Jesuits, whose pure and holy 
lives have been sacrificed in vain, have labored and died in 
savage wildernesses, in heathen cities, in malarious jungles, 
and in icy solitudes ; but the intrigues and vices of their Ital- 
ian masters have uniformly destroyed the fruits of their mar- 
tyrdom and self-devotion. 

With their home missions the Jesuits were more successful. 
Here, too, they strove to unite arms with letters, and to plant 
their free schools in the heretical North by diplomacy and the 
sword. They steeled the heart of Charles V. — if indeed he 
ever possessed one — against his Protestant subjects ; and he 
was soon induced to commence a bitter war against the heret- 
ical league. At the Battle of Miihlberg, where the Germans 
were routed and overthrown, Bobadilla appeared in the front 
ranks of the Catholic forces, mounted upon a spirited steed, 
waving his crucifix on high, and promising victory to the im- 
perial cause. ( 2 ) The Protestants fled, and soon in all their ter- 
rified cities flourishing Jesuit colleges sprung up, as if by mag- 
ic, and thousands of children were instructed and confirmed 
in the visions of Loyola and the decrees of the Council of 
Trent. The Jesuits made admirable teachers. Loyola was 
resolved to make his colleges splendid with erudition and 
genius. At Pome he gathered around him the most accom- 
plished professors, the most abundant learning ; and he lav- 



(*) Daurignac, i., p. 55. 

( 2 ) Steiumetz, i., p. 201; Cre"tmeau-Joly, i., p. 283: "He was wounded 
(frappe" a tete), but recovered." 



JESUIT LITERATURE. 127 

ished money in profusion to provide fine buildings, libraries, 
and all the apparatus of letters. The most intelligent scholars 
were noted, rewarded, encouraged; every promising genius 
was snatched from the world and devoted to the cultivation 
of inferior minds; a severe and perfect discipline prevailed in 
all his schools ; and it is chiefly as teachers that the Jesuits 
won their lasting triumphs in the German cities. Their free 
schools educated the rising generation; and the Protestants, 
who had heretofore possessed all the literature of the age, soon 
found themselves met and often overthrown by the keen cas- 
uistry of the Jesuit scholars. A reaction took place, and Ger- 
many seemed swiftly returning to the ancient faith. 

Yet the new literature of the Jesuits, confined by the op- 
pressive restrictions of their discipline, contained within itself 
a principle of decay. Genius could scarcely flourish under a 
system of mental serfdom ; learning oppressed grew dwarfed 
and imbecile. The Jesuit scholars were often laborious, ac- 
curate, methodical; but they produced no brilliant Scaliger 
nor daring Wolf. No poet, philosopher, nor original thinker 
could possibly arise in their schools; there was no Jesuit 
Goethe, no Schiller, no Shakspeare ; their mental labors were 
various and valuable, but never great ; they produced chiefly 
an immense, curious, and often worse than worthless kind of 
literature called casuistry. Q Of this they were fertile beyond 
example. Their intellect, pressed out of its natural growth, 
spread in matted vegetation along the ground, or clung in 
wild festoons around ancient oaks, like the gray mosses of a 
Southern forest. The countless works of casuistry produced 
by Jesuit scholars in the seventeenth century are usually ef- 
forts to show how far they are restricted in morals by the 
rules of their faith ; what acts are lawful, what expedient ; 
and their diligent effort to reconcile virtue with the supreme 
law of obedience led them to a strange condition of mental 
corruption. Mariana defended regicide, poisoning, and as- 
sassination : Father Garnet confessed that he did not hesitate 



0) The learned Tiraboschi and the ingenious Boscovich flourished durin* 
the suppression of the order. 



128 LOYOLA AND TEE JESUITS. 

to tell falsehoods for the good of his Church; and there is 
scarcely a crime in the list of human gnilt that the diseased 
intellect of the Jesuit fathers did not palliate or excuse. 

But it was chiefly as politicians that the Jesuits have won, 
and probably deserved, an infamous renown in history. The 
order was aggressive and ardent — full of grand schemes for 
the extirpation of heretics and the subjugation of England 
and the hardy North. Every member of the mighty league 
had sworn to give his life, if necessary, for the advancement 
of the faith ; was ready to fly at a sudden notice to the far- 
thest lands at the bidding of his superior or the Pope ; and 
perhaps might merit some frightful punishment at home did 
he not obey his commander to the uttermost. The irrevocable 
vow and the long practice in abject submission made the Jes- 
uits the most admirable instruments of crime. (*) In the hands 
of wicked popes like Gregory XIII., or cruel tyrants like Phil- 
ip II., they were never suffered to rest.( 2 ) Their exploits are 
among the most wonderful and daring in history. They are 
more romantic than the boldest pictures of the novelist ; more 
varied and interesting than the best-laid plots of the most 
inventive masters. No Arabian narrator nor Scottish wizard 
could have imagined them ; no Shakspeare could have foreseen 
the strange mental and political conditions that led the enthu- 
siasts on in their deeds of heroism and crime. Jesuits pene- 
trated, disguised, into England when death was their punish- 
ment if discovered ; hovered in strange forms around the per- 
son of Elizabeth, whose assassination was the favorite aim of 
Philip II, and the Pope ; reeled through the streets of Lon- 
don as pretended drunkards ; hid in dark closets and were fed 
through quills ; and often, when discovered, died in horrible 
tortures with silent joy. The very name of the new and act- 
ive society was a terror to all the Protestant courts. A single 
Jesuit was believed to be more dangerous than a whole mon- 
astery of Black-friars. A Campion, Parsons, or Garnet filled 
all England with alarm. And in all that long struggle which 
followed between the North and the South, in which the fierce 

C) Steinmetz, i. ; p. 452. ( 2 ) Cr^tineau-Joly, ii. ; p. 296. 



JESUIT ASSASSINS. 129 

Spaniards and Italians made a desperate assault upon the re- 
bellious region, strove to dethrone or destroy its kings, to crush 
the rising intellect of its people, or to extirpate the hated ele- 
ments of reform, the historians uniformly point to the Jesuits 
as the active agents in every rebellion, and the tried and un- 
flinching instruments of unsparing Kome.Q A Jesuit pene- 
trated in strange attire to Mary Queen of Scots, and lured her 
to her ruin. Another sought to convert or dethrone a king 
of Sweden. One conveyed the intelligence to Catherine and 
Charles IX. that produced a horrible massacre of the reform- 
ers. One traveled into distant Muscovy to sow the seeds of 
endless war. Mariana, an eminent Jesuit, published a work 
defending regicide which was faintly condemned by the or- 
der, and soon Henry III. fell by the assassin's blow ; William 
of Orange, pursued by the endless attempts of assassins, at last 
received the fatal wound; Elizabeth was hunted down, but 
escaped ; Henry IV., after many a dangerous assault, died, it 
was said, by the arts of the Jesuits ; James I. and his family 
escaped by a miracle from the plot of Fawkes and Garnet ; 
while many inferior characters of this troubled age disappear- 
ed suddenly from human sight, or were found stabbed and 
bleeding in their homes. All these frightful acts the men of 
that period attributed to the fatal vow of obedience. The 
Jesuit was the terror of his times. Catholics abhorred and 
shrunk from him with almost as much real aversion as Prot- 
estants. The universities and the clergy feared and hated 
the ^unscrupulous order. The Jesuit was renowned for his 
pitiless cruelty. ( 2 ) The mild Franciscans and Benedictines, 
and even the Spanish Dominicans, could not be relied upon 
by the popes and kings, and were cast contemptuously aside ; 
while their swift and ready rivals sprung forward at the 
slightest intimation of their superior, and, with a devotion to 
their chief at Rome not surpassed by that of the assassins of 
the Old Man of the Mountain, flung themselves in the face of 
death. 

One of the early victims of the fatal vow of obedience was 

O Motley, Netherlands, iii. ; p. 444. ( 2 ) Id. 

9 



130 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

William, Prince of Orange. Q He was the bulwark of Prot- 
estantism, the founder of a great nation. Philip II. of Spain 
had long pursued him with secret assassins and open plots : a 
ban had been pronounced against him, and a large reward was 
offered to any one who would destroy him ; and no name was 
so hated by the Catholics of every land as that of the grave 
and silent prince. Yet William had heretofore baffled all the 
efforts of his foe. He had made Holland free, had secured the 
independence of the Protestant faith, and still maintained the 
good cause against the arts and arms of the treacherous Philip 
by his singular energy and wisdom. He had escaped a thou- 
sand dangers, and seemed to glide through the midst of Phil- 
ip's assassins with a charmed life. Yet every violent Catholic 
was longing to send a dagger to the heart of the triumphant 
heretic, and hoped that with the death of William the Neth- 
erlands would once more fall into the power of the papal In- 
quisitors. 

Balthazar Gerard was one of the most bigoted of his party. 
He was the son of respectable parents in Burgundy. He was 
small in stature, insignificant in appearance ; but his whole 
nature was moved by a fierce desire to assassinate the Prince 
of Orange. When he was yet a youth, he had already formed 
the design of murdering the prince, whom he called a rebel 
against the Catholic King and a disturber of the Apostolic 
Church. At twenty, Balthazar had struck his dagger with all 
his strength into a door, exclaiming, " Would it had been the 
heart of Orange !" For seven years he meditated upon his de- 
sign ; but when Philip offered his reward for William's death, 
Gerard became more eager than ever before to execute his pur- 
pose. Fame, honors, wealth, the favor of his king, awaited the 
successful assassin, and he no longer hesitated. He first, how- 
ever, confessed his design to the regent of the Jesuit college at 
Luxemburg, and received his warm commendation. A second 
Jesuit, to whom he mentioned his plan, dissuaded him from 
it, not because he disapproved of it, but from its difficulty. 
He next presented himself to Alexander, Prince of Parma, the 

( x ) Motley, Dutch Kep., iii,, p. 596 et seq. 



WILLIAM OF ORANGE. 131 

most brilliant soldier of the age. Parma had long been look- 
ing for some one to murder William, but Balthazar's insignifi- 
cant stature and feeble appearance seemed to him ill-suited to 
the task. The young assassin's fierce resolution, however, soon 
induced the prince to encourage him ; and he promised Bal- 
thazar that if he fell in the attempt the expected reward should 
be given to his parents. His plan was to disguise himself as 
a Calvinist, the son of one who had died for his faith, and, hav- 
ing claimed aid from William, to gain access to his presence 
and shoot him down with a pistol. (') 

The prince was now living in a quiet retirement at the lit- 
tle town of Delft. His house was plain, although large, and 
stood on Delft Street, a pleasant canal that ran through the 
city, and which was shaded by rows of lime-trees that in sum- 
mer filled the air with the perfume of their blossoms. The 
house was of brick, two stories high, with a roof covered with 
red tiles. In front a considerable court-yard opened toward 
the canal. And here, in the quiet little Dutch town, surround- 
ed by his affectionate family and followed by the love of his 
countrymen, William lived in a calm tranquillity, careless of 
the plottings of his foes. Balthazar, meantime, reached Delft 
in July, 1584, as a special messenger to William of Orange. 
He appeared as a modest, pious youth, always carrying a Bible 
under his arm ; and, to his great surprise, he was at once ad- 
mitted to the prince's chamber. He stood before his victim. 
Yet he had no arms to carry out his design, and Parma had 
been so penurious as to leave him without money. William, 
hearing of his poverty, sent him some small gift, which Bal- 
thazar laid out in buying a pair of pistols from a soldier. The 
latter killed himself the next day when he learned to what use 
his pistols had been applied. 

At half -past twelve o'clock, on the 10th of July, the prince, 
with his wife, and the ladies and gentlemen of his family, 
passed into the dining-room of the plain Dutch house, and sat 
down to dinner. On their way they were accosted by Gerard, 
who, with pale and agitated countenance, asked for a passport. 

(*) Motley, Dutch Rep., iii,, p. 596 et seq. 



132 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

The princess, who noticed him, said in a low tone that she 
had never seen so villainous an expression. The cheerful din- 
ner was over' by two o'clock. The company rose from the ta- 
ble and passed out, the prince leading the way. As he as- 
cended a staircase to go to the upper floor, Gerard came out 
from an archway and shot him to the heart. He died ex- 
claiming, " My God, have mercy on this poor people !" The 
murderer meantime fled swiftly from the house, and had near- 
ly escaped over the city walls when he stumbled and was 
seized by the guards. He was executed with horrible tort- 
ures, and in his confession related how he had been confirmed 
in his design by the Jesuit father at Luxemburg. Philip II. 
and the violent Catholics looked upon his act as highly meri- 
torious. The king ennobled and enriched his parents, and as 
the price of blood his family took their place among the no- 
bility of the land. 

In the Netherlands the Jesuits were the last persecutors. 
They clung to the use of brutal violence in religious mat- 
ters when the practice had almost died out. " Send us more 
Jesuits," was always the demand of the Spanish commanders 
when they would complete the subjection of some conquered 
city,( J ) and Jesuit colleges were founded at once amidst the 
ruins of Antwerp and Haarlem. The opinions of Loyola and 
the decrees of the Council of Trent were enforced in the 
Netherlands by the massacre of helpless thousands; and it 
was chiefly upon the poor that the persecutors executed their 
worst outrages. A poor serving-woman, Anna Yan der Hove, 
was the last and most remarkable of their victims. Two 
maiden ladies lived on the north rampart of Antwerp, who 
had formerly professed the Protestant faith, and had been 
thrown into prison ; but they had prudently renounced their 
errors, and now went devoutly to mass. Not so, however, did 
their maid-servant, Anna, who was about forty years of age, 
and was firm in the faith in which she had been born and ed- 
ucated. The Jesuits, enraged at her obstinate honesty, re- 
solved to make the poor serving-woman an example to all her 

( J ) Motley, Netherlands, iii., p. 444., 



JESUIT EXECUTIONS. 133 

class. They denounced her to the authorities, claiming her 
execution under an old law so cruel that every one believed it 
had long been laid aside. Anna was condemned to be buried 
alive, the legal punishment of heretics ; but the Jesuits told 
her she might escape her doom if she would recant and be rec- 
onciled to the Catholic Church. The honest woman refused. 
She said she had read her Bible and had found there nothing 
said of popes, purgatory, or the invocation of saints. How 
could she ever hope to merit a future bliss if she professed to 
believe what she knew to be false % Far rather would she die 
than lose that heavenly crown which she saw shining resplen- 
dently even for her humble head above. She would do noth- 
ing against her conscience. She desired to interfere with no 
other person's belief ; but for herself, she said, she preferred 
death to the unpardonable sin of dishonesty. 

On a fair midsummer morning she was led out of the city 
of Brussels, where her trial had taken place, to a hay-field near 
at hand. A Jesuit father walked on either side, followed by 
several monks called love - brothers, who taunted Anna with 
her certain doom in another world, calling her harsh and cruel 
names. But she did not hear them. All her thoughts were 
now fixed on heaven. There she saw the golden gates wide 
open, and angels stooping down to snatch her from the power 
of Satan. They put her in a pit already prepared, and, when 
she was half covered with earth, once more tempted her to 
recant and save her life. Again she refused ; the earth was 
thrown in, and the executioners trod it down upon her sacred 
head. Such was the last religious murder in the Netherlands. (') 

Meantime the Jesuits had long been engaged in a series of 
vigorous efforts to conquer rebellious England. The whole 
intellect and energy of the company was directed to this dar- 
ing but almost hopeless attempt. Popes and priests had ex- 
ulted in a momentary triumph when Mary gave her hand and 
heart to Philip II., and when Cranmer, Pidley, Rogers, and a 
host of martyrs had died to consecrate the fatal nuptials. ( 2 ) 

(*) Motley, Netherlands, iii., p. 446. 

( 2 ) Cre'tineau-Joly defends Mary on various grounds, ii., p. 336. 



134 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

But the accession of Elizabeth had once more filled Rome and 
Spain with inexpressible rage. The heretical queen became 
the object of an endless number of plots and projects of as- 
sassination. Jesuits hid themselves in London or wandered 
from house to house through the Catholic districts, exciting 
the zeal of the faithful, and vainly striving to arouse all Cath- 
olic England to revolt in favor of Mary Queen of Scots. 
Elizabeth was in imminent danger. The Jesuit, Parsons, de- 
nounced her as a murderess and a bastard. Philip sent his 
Armada against her loaded with priests. But the great ma- 
jority of her Catholic subjects remained true to their native 
queen, and the Jesuits found but little sympathy even among 
those whom they looked upon as their natural allies. 

Father Garnet is one of the most noted of these imprudent 
Jesuits. He was the provincial of the English company. The 
Jesuits, on the death of Elizabeth, had formed a wild scheme 
to prevent the accession of James, and the king renewed and 
enforced the severe laws against his Catholic subjects. Ruin 
hung over them, and the imprudent conduct of the aggressive 
Jesuits had only brought destruction to their friends and to 
their cause.Q In this extremity it is charged that they enter- 
ed upon a still more desperate scheme — the G-unpowder Plot. 
Father Garnet, as he was called, the Jesuit provincial, was now 
in England, with several others of his company, and a plan 
was formed by the zealous Catholics to blow up the Houses of 
Parliament and King James with gunpowder. The plot was 
discovered, and Guy Fawkes was seized in the cellars of the 
Parliament House just as he was about to set fire to the bar- 
rels of powder. Fawkes is represented by the Jesuits as hav- 
ing been a man of great piety, amiable, cheerful, of unblem- 
ished honor, and strict in all religious observances. All of the 
conspirators belonged to the Jesuit faction, and it is believed 
that none of the English Catholics were engaged in the plot. 
A search was at once made for concealed Jesuits. Several es- 
caped to the continent ; but Garnet lay hidden at a house in 
Hendlip, near Worcester. He was concealed, with another 

(*) Steinmetz, ii., p. 200. 



FATHER GARNET. 135 

Jesuit and two servants, in one of those secret chambers which 
were common at that period in the houses of wealthy Catho- 
lics. Here the unhappy fugitives were imprisoned for seven 
days and nights. Q) Their retreat was so small that they were 
obliged to remain constantly sitting with their knees bent un- 
der them. They were fed upon marmalade and sweetmeats, 
or soups and broths, that were conveyed through reeds that 
passed through a chimney into the next apartment. They 
were traced by their pursuers to Hendlip, and a magistrate 
came with his officers to search the house. He was received 
by the lady of the house, her husband being absent, with an 
air of cheerfulness, and the pursuers were told that their prey 
had escaped. For three days they searched the house in vain. 
Every apartment was carefully examined ; every closet open- 
ed ; but nothing was found. On the fourth day, however, 
hunger drove the prisoners to venture imprudently from their 
retreat; they were seen by the guards, and the hiding-place 
discovered. Pale with fasting and confinement, Garnet and 
his companions were dragged away to trial and death. 

Garnet's trial was a sad and repulsive picture.( 2 ) That he 
was guilty of sharing in the plot can scarcely be doubted. He 
professed, indeed, that he had sought to dissuade the conspira- 
tors from their design ; but he was more than once convicted 
of falsehood during his trial, and defended his want of truth- 
fulness on the ground that it was necessary to his safety. He 
was condemned and executed. The Jesuits looked upon him 
as a martyr, and a famous miracle was held to have attested 
his innocence. Garnet's straw became renowned throughout 
Europe, and all the Catholic courts celebrated in ballads and 
treatises this wonderful exculpation of the saint.Q The mi- 
raculous straw was a beard of wheat on which a Jesuit student 
who stood by at Garnet's execution saw a drop of his blood 
fall ; as he stooped to look upon it he discovered inscribed 
upon the straw the glorified countenance of the martyr, crown- 

C) Steinmetz, ii., p. 207. 

( 2 ) Cre'tineau-Joly, iii., p. 112, defends him feebly. 

( 3 ) Steinmetz, ii., p. 244. 



136 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

ed and bearing a cross upon its brow. Thousands came to 
see the wonderful vision; nobles, the Spanish embassador, 
the Catholic laity, saw and believed. The miracle was told 
throughout the Christian world. Volumes were written to 
defend or discredit the prodigy ; the beard of wheat was en- 
graved by skillful artists and celebrated by ardent poets ; and 
it was never suspected that the rude outlines on the straw had 
been painted by the skillful touch of a designing priest. 

The later history of the wonderful brotherhood has been a 
varied series of disasters and success. Always united in a com- 
pact phalanx, the Jesuits have fought gallantly to conquer the 
world. Their selfish unity, their political ambition, their ag- 
gressive vigor, have involved them in endless struggles. Their 
bitterest enemies have been those of their own faith. The 
secular priests in every land decried and denounced the Jesu- 
its. In England they accused them of bringing ruin upon the 
Church by their imprudent violence ; and, indeed, the Gun- 
powder Plot seems to have crushed forever the hopes of the 
English Catholics. In France the seculars charged them with 
falsehood, license, and every species of crime. Yet the Jesuit 
Father Cotton ruled in the court of Henry IY. ; and many 
years later the destructive energy of his Jesuit conf essorsQ led 
Louis XIY. to revoke the Edict of Nantes, and commence a 
general persecution of the Huguenots. It was the most dis- 
astrous event in all the history of France; it drove from her 
borders her best intellect, her most useful population ; and the 
horrible reaction of the French Revolution may be in great 
part traced to the results of Jesuit bigotry. For if Port Roy- 
al had been suffered to stand, and the Protestants to refine and 
purify the French, it is possible that no revolution would ever 
have been needed. In Austria the Jesuits were equally un- 
lucky. They gained a complete control of the unhappy land. 
They taught everywhere passive obedience. They urged Ru- 
dolph II. to persecute the Protestants of Bohemia, and soon 
that kingdom was filled with woe ; the Protestants were roused 
to madness, and a spirit of vengeance was awakened that led 

C) Cr6tineau-Joly, iv. ? p. 40, defends the confessors. 



FALL OF JESUITISM. 137 

finally to the Thirty Years' War. All Germany sprung to 
arms ; the puritanic Swede came down from thoughtful Scan- 
dinavia and crushed Austria and Catholicism to the earth; 
Prussia now rose into greatness, and the hardy North slowly 
created a power that seems destined finally to complete a uni- 
ted and Protestant Germany. If the Jesuits had not excited 
the Thirty Tears' War, Catholicism, in its mildest form, might 
still have ruled the Germans. In Poland and in Russia the 
political labors of the Jesuits were equally unfortunate for 
themselves and the Roman See. Yet through the close of 
the sixteenth century, and a great part of the seventeenth, the 
army of Loyola presented a united and vigorous front to its 
foes, and led the priestly legions of Italy and Spain in their 
assaults upon the revolted North. From 1550 to the year 
1700, Jesuitism played its important part in the politics of Eu- 
rope, Africa, America, and the East. 

But now disaster and destruction fell upon the wonderful 
brotherhood. Moral corruption had come upon them, their 
intellects had sunk into feebleness, and the fatal mental bond- 
age to which they had subjected themselves brought with it 
a necessary decay. Jesuits became renowned for their luxu- 
ry and extravagance, their imperfect discipline, their secret or 
open crimes. They had triumphed over the ruins of Port 
Royal and the Jansenists ; but the inspired satire of the most 
vigorous of modern writers had pierced the diseased frame of 
the society with deadly wounds. Pascal avenged Arnauld; 
and literature aimed its bolts from heaven at the destroyers of 
the most learned of monasteries. The Jesuits were pursued 
with shouts of derision. Their tomes of casuistry, in which 
they showed how vice might become virtue and virtue vice, 
were dragged into the light and commented upon by the 
Northern press. They were accused of all the consequences 
of their argument. Jesuits were called regicides, murderers, 
rebels, the enemies of mankind ; and at length the kings and 
priests of Europe, aided by the reluctant Pope, united in de- 
stroying the army of Loyola. Blow after blow fell upon the 
once omnipotent Jesuits. They were persecuted in every 
Catholic land with almost as much rigor as they themselves 



138 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

had once exercised against the Calvinists of the Netherlands 
or the Huguenots of France. In vain they boasted their de- 
votion to Mary, their passive fidelity to the Pope ; vainly they 
invoked the sacred names of Xavier and Ignatius. By a 
strange retribution, Portugal,^) where the power of the Jesuits 
had first been felt as politicians, and which they had aided in 
delivering into the hands of Philip of Spain, was to set the ex- 
ample to Europe of driving them from its midst. Savoy, in- 
deed, always progressive, had, in 1728, banished the order from 
its mountains ; but to Portugal the Jesuits owed their first 
great overthrow, and the vigorous Pombal crushed them with 
an iron hand. All Jesuits were expelled from Portugal and 
its dependencies in 1753, upon the pretext that they were as- 
sassins and conspirators against their king.( 2 ) 

France was the next of the avengers of uprooted Port Roy- 
al ; but here the honesty of a Jesuit confessor may have has- 
tened their fall. De Sacy refused to shrive Madame de Pom- 
padour, or to countenance her alliance with a dissolute king. 
The enraged woman resolved on the destruction of the Jesuits. 
Louis XV. reluctantly yielded to her entreaties and the clamor 
of his courtiers ; and, in 1764, a final decree was issued expel- 
ling the order of Ignatius from the realm of France. The 
Jesuits fled from the kingdom, followed by the jeers and 
mockery of the philosophers, and covered with an infamy 
which they had well deserved. Spain and Italy alone re- 
mained to them, for Austria was already planning a reform ; 
but it was in Spain that the Jesuits were to meet with their 
bitterest overthrow. ( 3 ) In their native land they had won 
their greatest successes ; their colleges in every Spanish city 
were rich and flourishing beyond example ; their wealth and 
luxury had made them the envy of the Dominicans and the 
scourge of the inferior orders. Yet the " pious " Charles III., 
moved by an inexplicable impulse, had learned to look upon 
the Jesuits with terror and aversion. "I have learned to 



(*) Cre*tineau-Joly, v., p. 193. 

( 2 ) Id., v., p. 200, relates the sufferings of the Jesuits. 

( 3 ) Daurignac, ii. ? pp. 151, 175. 






THE JESUITS DRIVEN FROM SPAIX. 139 

know them too well !" he exclaimed, with a sigh. " I have 
been already too lenient to so dangerous a body." Silently 
and with careful preparation their ruin was planned. A se- 
cret edict was issued to Spain, and to all the Spanish domin- 
ions in Africa, Asia, America, directing that on the same day 
and hour, in every part of the realm, the Jesuit colleges should 
be entered by the officers of justice, their wealth seized and 
confiscated, and the members of the society hurried upon ship- 
board and forced to seek some new home. 

One can scarcely read without compassion of the wide suf- 
fering that now fell upon thousands of the innocent as well as 
of the guilty. Armed men entered the Jesuit establishments 
through all Spain, and made their inmates prisoners. They 
were ordered to leave the country instantly, each priest being 
allowed to take with him only a purse, a breviary, and some 
necessary apparel. (*) Xearly six thousand were thus seized, 
crowded together in the holds of ships, and sent adrift upon 
the sea with no place of refuge and no means of support. 
Aged priests, often of illustrious birth or famous in letters and 
position — the young, burning with religious zeal — the sick, 
the infirm, set sail on their sad pilgrimage from the Spanish 
coast, and naturally bent their way toward Italy and Rome, 
the object of their idolatrous devotion. But the Pope, with 
signal ingratitude and selfish timidity, refused to receive the 
exiles. Even Ricci, the general of the order, would not suffer 
them to enter Rome ; and the miserable Jesuits, the victims 
of their fatal vow of obedience, were scattered as starving 
wanderers through all the borders of Europe. ( 2 ) 

In the Spanish colonies the harsh decree was executed with 
a similar severity. At Lima the wealth and power of the Jes- 
uits had increased to regal grandeur. Their great college, San 
Pedro, possessed enormous revenues, owned the finest build- 
ings in the city, and held immense plantations in its neighbor- 
hood. It was believed that the vaults of the college were fill- 
ed with gold and silver, and the Government hoped to win an 
extraordinary prize in the plunder of the hidden treasure. A 

C) Steinmetz, ii. ; p. 463. ( 3 ) Dauriguac, ii., p. 152. 



140 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

perfect secrecy was observed in executing the king's mandate, 
and no one but the viceroy and his agents were supposed to 
know any thing of the design. At ten o'clock at night the 
viceroy summoned his council together ; at midnight the offi- 
cers knocked at the gate of the splendid college of San Pedro, 
hoping to find the Jesuits unprepared, and with no means of 
hiding their coveted treasure. But they found every priest 
awake, dressed, and with his little bundle ready to set out on 
the mournful journey. A secret message had been sent from 
Europe warning the order of their coming doom.Q The 
priests were hurried away to the ships at Callao, and sent out 
to sea, while the officers of the viceroy searched in vain 
through every part of the college for the promised hoard of 
gold. Instead of millions, they found only a few thousand 
dollars. It was believed that the wily fathers had been able 
to bury their gold in such a way that none but themselves 
could find it. An old negro servant related that he and his 
companions had been employed for several nights, with band- 
aged eyes, in carrying great bags of money down into the 
vaults of the college, and that it was buried in the earth, close 
to a subterranean spring. But the place has never been 
found. The Jesuit treasure in Lima is still searched for, like 
that of Captain Kidd ; while some assert that the fathers have 
contrived to abstract it gradually, and have thus mocked and 
baffled the avarice of their persecutors. 

At last came the final blow that was to shatter into pieces 
the great army of Loyola. For more than two centuries the 
Jesuits had been fighting the battles of Home. To exalt the 
supremacy of the Pope, they had died by thousands in English 
jails and Indian solitudes ; had pierced land and sea to carry 
the strange story of the primacy to heathen millions, and to 
build anew the mediaeval Church in the heart of Oriental idol- 
atry. And now it was the Pope and Kome that were to com- 
plete their destruction. By a cruel ingratitude, the deity on 
earth whom they had worshiped with a fidelity unequaled 
among men was to hurl his anathemas against his most faith- 

( x ) Tschudi, Travels in Peru, p. 67. 



TEE ORDER DISSOLVED. 141 

ful disciples. France and Spain elected Pope Clement XIV. 
upon his pledge that he would dissolve the order. He issued 
his bull, July 21st, 1773, directing that, for the welfare of the 
Church and the good of mankind, the institution of Loyola 
should be abolished^ 1 ) The Jesuits protested in vain. Kicci, 
the general, threw himself at the feet of the cardinals, wept, 
entreated, recalled the memories of Trent, the exploits of Loy- 
ola ; and suggested, in a whisper, that Clement, like Judas, 
had sold his Lord. The Pope, not long after, died in fearful 
torments. The Jesuits were allowed to preserve a secret uni- 
ty ; but it was reported once more that the horrible custom of 
the Middle Ages had been revived ; that the Pope had been 
carried off by poison. 

Driven from their almost ancestral homes in Spain, Italy, 
Austria, France, the Jesuits found a liberal welcome in the 
heart of Protestantism itself. Persecuted like heretics by the 
Church of Koine, they now sought a shelter in those free 
lands against which they had once aimed its spiritual and 
temporal arm. And it is curious to reflect that had the Jes- 
uits succeeded in their early design of subjecting the North, 
they would have left for themselves no place of refuge in 
their hour of need. To their enemies of the sixteenth cent- 
ury they came in the close of the eighteenth, asking hospital- 
ity; and the disciples of Loyola were scattered over every 
part of Protestant Europe, as teachers, professors, men of let- 
ters and science, and were everywhere received with friendly 
consideration. England, charitably overlooking the past, saw 
Jesuit colleges and schools flourish in her midst without 
alarm. ( 2 ) Frederick the Great opened an asylum for the ex- 
iles in Silesia. Catherine II. welcomed them to St. Peters- 
burg, and Greek bishops were often seen mingling in friendly 
intercourse with the members of the once hostile company. 
Many Jesuits crossed the sea to the free lands of the New 
"World. Expelled from Lima, and persecuted in Brazil, they 
founded their schools freely in Louisville and New York, and 
flourished with vigor under institutions and laws which owed 

O Cr^tineau-Joly, v., p. 376. ( 2 ) Id., \l, p. 81. 



142 LOYOLA AND THE JESUITS. 

their birth to the teachings of Luther and Calvin. The doc- 
trine of universal toleration alone saved the Jesuits from a 
complete destruction ; and we may reasonably trust that, as 
the army of Loyola recruits its shattered strength in the bo- 
som of Protestantism and freedom, it will show its gratitude 
by abstaining from all hostile attempts against the institutions 
by which it is nurtured ; that the Jesuit will never suffer his 
promise of obedience to an Italian potentate to interfere with 
his obligation to free thought, free schools, and a free press. 

Thus, fostered by the descendants of Kidley and Cranmer, 
and sheltered by the arm of schismatic Russia, the fallen soci- 
ety prolonged its existence. At length, in 1814, the Bourbons 
were restored to France, and Pope Pius YII. revived the or- 
der of the Jesuits. Their college at Pome was given back to 
them in very nearly the same condition in which they had 
left it nearly forty years before ; but their magnificent library 
was scattered, and their revenues cut off. A scanty band of 
eighty-six fathers, worn with toil and wandering, made, it is 
said, a triumphal entry into Pome, amidst the acclamations of 
its people^ 1 ) Yet it can scarcely be doubted that the fol- 
lowers of Loyola are as unpopular with the citizens of the 
Holy City as they seem ever to have been with the people of 
all Catholic lands. Isolated by their fatal vow of obedience, 
they are followed everywhere by suspicion and dislike. Pus- 
sia, which had received them in their hour of need, expelled 
them again in 1816 ;( 2 ) France drove them out in 1845; the 
people of Madrid, in 1835, massacred their Jesuits ; the Pope 
again exiled them from Pome ; and it is only England and 
America that even in the present day afford a secure asylum 
to the fallen company. 

We may return over the long lapse of years to the last days 
of Loyola, the wounded cavalier of Pampeluna, the hermit of 
Manreza. In the year 1556, a comet of startling magnitude, 
half as large as the moon, blazed over Europe and filled the 
uncultivated intellect of the age with dread and expectation. 
Loyola lay on his dying bed. His life had been one of singu- 

O Daurignac, ii. ; p. 218. ( 2 ) Id., ii., p. 228. 



LOYOLA'S DEATH. 143 

lar success. His society had already become one of the great 
powers of the earth. His followers were estimated to num- 
ber many thousands ; and the last injunctions of the soldier- 
priest were chiefly an inculcation of passive obedience. It is 
related that he died without receiving the last sacraments of 
his Church, and that his dying lips uttered only complaints 
and lamentation. Q Yet his fierce and aggressive spirit sur- 
vived in his successors, and the generals of the company of 
Loyola waged incessant war against the rights of conscience 
and the simplicity of the faith, until they were finally over- 
thrown by the united voice of Christendom. 

C) Steinmetz, i., p. 292 ; Hasenm., Hist. Jes. Ord. ; xi v p. 320. 



ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

At the splendid city of Mcsea, in Bithynia, in the year 325, 
assembled the first of those great ecumenical councils whose 
decrees have so often controlled the destiny of Christianity 
and of mankind. Q It was an occasion of triumph and fond 
congratulation, for the Christian Church had just risen up 
from a period of unexampled humiliation and suffering to 
rule over the Roman world. For nearly three centuries since 
the death of their Divine Head his pious disciples had toiled 
in purity and love, persecuted or scorned by the dominant, pa- 
gans, for the conversion of the human race ; and the humble 
but persistent missionaries had sealed with innumerable mar- 
tyrdoms and ceaseless woes the final triumph of their faith.( 2 ) 
Yet never in all its early history had the Christian Church 
seemed so near its perfect extinction as in the universal perse- 
cution of Diocletian and his Caesars, when the pagan rulers 
could boast with an appearance of truth that they had extir- 
pated the hated sect with fire and sword. In the year 304, 
except in Gaul, every Christian temple lay in ruins, and the 
terrified worshipers no longer ventured to meet in their sacred 
assemblies ; the holy books had been burned, the church prop- 
erty confiscated by the pagan magistrates, the church mem- 
bers had perished in fearful tortures, or fled for safety to the 
savage wilderness ; and throughout all the Roman world no 
man dared openly to call himself a Christian.( 3 ) 

Gradually, with the slow prevalence of Constantine the 

( x ) Eusebius, De Vita Constantini, iii., p. 6 et seq., Quomodo synodum 
Nicseae fieri jussit; Kufinus, Historia Ecclesiastica, i., p. 11 j De concilio 
apnd Nicseam, etc. ; Socrates, Hist. Ecc, i., p. 8. 

( 2 ) Lactantius, De Mort. Persec, p. 15. 

( 3 ) Lactantius (De Mort. Pers., p. 50) and Prudentius (Peristephanon, 
Hymn xiii., x.) describe the pains of martyrdom. 



THE ASSEMBLING AT NICE. 145 

Great, as Iris victorious legions passed steadily onward from 
Gaul to Italy, and from Italy to Syria, the maimed and bleed- 
ing victims of persecution came out from their hiding-places ; 
and bishops and people, purified by suffering, celebrated once 
more their holy rites in renewed simplicity and faith. Yet it 
was not until the year preceding the first Ecumenical Coun- 
cil^) that the Eastern Christians had ceased to be roasted over 
slow fires, lacerated with iron hooks, or mutilated with fatal 
tortures; and Lactantius, a contemporary, could point to the 
ruins of a city in Phrygia whose whole population had been 
burned to ashes because they refused to sacrifice to Jupiter 
and Juno. And now, by a strange and sudden revolution, 
the martyr bishops and presbyters had been summoned from 
their distant retreats in the monasteries of the Thebaid or the 
sands of Arabia, from Africa or Gaul, to cross the dangerous 
seas, the inclement mountains, and to meet in a general synod 
at Nicsea, to legislate for the Christian world. We may well 
conceive the joy and triumph of these holy fathers as they 
heard the glad news of the final victory of the faith, and has- 
tened in long and painful journeys to unite in fond congratu- 
lations in their solemn assembly ; as they looked for the first 
time upon each other's faces and saw the wounds inflicted by 
the persecutor's hand ; as they gazed on the blinded eyes, the 
torn members, the emaciated frames ; as they encountered at 
every step men whose fame for piety, genius, and learning 
was renowned from Antioch to Cordova; or studied with 
grateful interest the form and features of the imperial cate- 
chumen, who, although the lowest in rank of all the church 
dignitaries, had made Christianity the ruling faith from Brit- 
ain to the Arabian Sea.( a ) 

Kice, or Nicaea, a fair and populous Greek city of Asia 
Minor, had been appointed by Constantine as the place of 
meeting for the council, probably because the fine roads that 
centred from various directions in its market-place offered an 

(*) Sozomen, Hist. Ecc, i., p. 7 ; Lactantius, De Mort. Pers., p. 51 : " Pleni 
carceres erant. Tormenta genera inaudita excogitabantur." 

( 2 ) Eusebius, De Vita Constautiui, iii. ; p. 7 ; Rufinus, Hist. Ecc., i., p. 2. 

10 



146 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

easy access to the pilgrims of the East. The city stood — its 
ruins still stand — on the shores of Lake Ascania, not far from 
the Mediterranean Sea, and on the way to the plains of Troy ; 
it had been adorned with tine buildings by the kings of Bi- 
thynia, and enriched by the Roman emperors ; in later ages it 
was shaken by a great earthquake just after the council had 
dissolved ; it became the prey successively of the Saracen, the 
Turk, and the Crusaders ; and when a modern traveler visited 
its site to gaze on the scene where Athanasius had ravished 
pious ears by his youthful eloquence, and where Constantine 
had assembled the Christian world, he found only a waste of 
ruins in the midst of the ancient walls. The lake was still 
there ; the fragments of aqueducts, theatres, temples. A vil- 
lage of a few hundred houses, supported chiefly by the culture 
of the mulberry-tree, sheltered beneath its ruined walls ; and 
an ill-built Greek church, of crumbling brick-work and mod- 
ern architecture, was pointed out to the traveler as the place 
where had met, nearly fifteen centuries before, the Council of 
Mce.C) 

The bishops, in number three hundred and eighteen, to- 
gether with many priests and other officials, assembled prompt- 
ly at the call of the emperor, and in June, 325, met in a ba- 
silica or public hall in the centre of the city. Few particulars 
are preserved of the proceedings of the great council, and we 
are forced to gather from the allusions of the historians a gen- 
eral conception of its character. Yet we know that it was the 
purest, the wisest, as well as the first, of all the sacred synods ; 
that its members, tested in affliction and humbled by persecu- 
tion, preserved much of the grace and gentleness of the apos- 
tolic age ; that no fierce anathemas, like those that fell from 
the lips of the papal bishops of Trent or Constance, defiled 
those of Hosius or Eusebius ;( 2 ) that the pagan doctrine of 
persecution had not yet been introduced, together with the 



(*) Pococke, Travels, ii., p. 25. 

( 2 ) The creed lias a moderate anathema (Rufinus, H. E., i., p. 6) ; but, we 
may trust, conceived in a different spirit from the anathemas which meant 
death. 



THE TOWN-HALL AT SICE. 147 

pagan ritual, into the Christian Church ; that no vain supersti- 
tions were inculcated, and no cruel deeds enjoined; that no 
Huss or Jerome of Prague died at the stake to gratify the 
hate of a dominant sect, and that no Luther or Calvin was 
shut out by the dread of a similar fate from sharing in the 
earliest council of the Christian world. The proceedings went 
on with dignity and moderation, and men of various shades of 
opinion, but of equal purity of life, were heard with attention 
and respect; the rules of the Koman Senate were probably 
imitated in the Christian assembly; the emperor opened the 
council in a speech inculcating moderation, and an era of be- 
nevolence and love seemed about to open upon the triumph- 
ant Church. 

In the town -hall at Nice, seated probably upon rows of 
benches that ran around the room, were seen the representa- 
tive Christians of an age of comparative purity, and the first 
meeting of these holy men must have formed a scene of touch- 
ing interest. The martyrs who had scarcely escaped with life 
from the tortures of the pagans stood in the first rank in the 
veneration of the assembly ; and when Paphnutius.Q a bishop 
of the Thebaid, entered the hall, dragging a disabled limb 
which had been severed while he worked in the mines, and 
turned upon the by-standers his sightless eye, or when Paul, 
Bishop of Neo-Caesarea, raised in blessing his hand maimed 
by the fire, a thrill of sympathy and love stirred the throng as 
they gazed on the consecrated wounds. The solitaries, whose 
strange austerities had filled the Christian world with wonder, 
attracted an equal attention. Prom the desert borders of 
Persia and Mesopotamia, where he had lived for years on 
vegetables and wild fruits, came James of Nisibis, the modern 
Baptist, who was known by his raiment of goats' or camels' 
hair ; and near him was the Bishop of Heraclea, a faithful fol- 
lower of the ascetic Anthony, the author of the monastic rule. 
There, too, was the gentle Spiridion.Q the shepherd-bishop of 

C) Kufinus, i., p. 4, De Paphnntio Confessore. 

( 2 ) Kufinus. i.. p. 5. Socrates, i., p. 53, varies the story slightly. See 
Hefele, ConcLliengeschichte ; i.. p. 271. 



148 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

Cyprus, who still kept his flock after he had won a diocese, 
and who, when robbers came to steal his sheep, said, " Why 
did you not take the trouble to ask for them, and I would 
have given them to you ?" And there was the tender-hearted 
St. Nicholas, the friend of little children, whose name is still 
a symbol of joy to those he loved. There, too, were men of 
rare genius and learning, who had studied in the famous 
schools of Athens or Alexandria, whose writings and whose 
eloquence had aroused the bitterest hatred of the pagans, and 
who were believed by their contemporaries to have rivaled 
and outdone the highest efforts of the heathen mind. Chief 
among these men of intellect was the young presbyter Atha- 
nashiSjQ and it was to him that the Council of Nice was to 
owe its most important influence on mankind. The enthusi- 
asm of Athanasius was tempered by the prudence of Hosius, 
the Trinitarian bishop of Cordova, and by the somewhat latitu- 
dinarian liberality of Eusebius of Csesarea ; and these two able 
men, both close friends of the Emperor Constantine, probably 
guided the council to moderation and peace. Sylvester, Bish- 
op of Rome, too feeble to bear the fatigues of the journey, 
sent two priests to represent him in the synod.( 2 ) Eight bish- 
ops of renown from the West sat with their Eastern brethren, 
and in the crowded assembly were noticed a Persian and a 
Goth, the representatives of the barbarians. A strange diver- 
sity of language and of accent prevailed in the various deputa- 
tions, and a day of Pentecost seemed once more to have dawn- 
ed upon the Church. In the upper end of the hall, after all 
had taken their places, a golden chair was seen below the seats 
of the bishops, which was still vacant. At length a man of a 
tall and noble flgure entered. His head was modestly bent to 
the ground ; his countenance must have borne traces of con- 
trition and woe. He advanced slowly up the hall, between 
the assembled bishops, and, having obtained their permission, 



(*) Socrates, i., p. 8. 

( 2 ) The Romish writers claim that Hosius was a papal legate. See Con- 
ciliorum, ii. ; p. 222. But he presided, no doubt, as the friend of the em- 
peror. 



COXSTAXTINE'S CRIME. 149 

seated himself in the golden chair.Q It was Constantine, the 
head of the Church. 

A tragic interest must ever hang over the career of the first 
Christian emperor, whose private griefs seem to have more 
than counterbalanced the uninterrupted successes of his pub- 
lic life. In his youth Constantine had married Minervina, a 
maiden of obscure origin and low rank, but who to her de- 
voted and constant lover seemed no doubt the first and fairest 
of women. Their only son, Crispus, educated by the learned 
and pious Lactantius, grew up an amiable, exemplary young 
man, and fought bravely by his father's side in the battle that 
made Constantine the master of the world. But Constantine 
had now married a second time, for ambition rather than love, 
Fausta, the daughter of the cruel Emperor Maximian ; and his 
high-born wife, who had three sons, looked with jealousy upon 
the rising virtues and renown of the amiable Crispus. She 
taught her husband to believe that his eldest son had conspired 
against his life and his crown. Already, when Constantine 
summoned the council at Nice, his mind was tortured by sus- 
picion of one whom he probably loved with strong affection. 
He had perhaps resolved upon the death of Crispus ; and he 
felt with shame, if not contrition, his own unworthiness as he 
entered the Christian assembly. Soon after the dissolution of 
the council the tragedy of the palace began (326) by the ex- 
ecution of Crispus, by the orders of his father, together with 
his young cousin, Licinius, the son of Constantine' s sister, and 
a large number of their friends. The guilty arts of Fausta, 
however, according to the Greek historians, were soon dis- 
covered and revealed to the emperor by his Christian moth- 
er, Helena. He was filled with a boundless remorse. The 
wretched empress was put to death; and the close of Con- 
stantine's life was passed in a vain effort to obtain the for- 
giveness of his own conscience and of Heaven.( 2 ) 

(*) Eusebius, De Vita Const., clothes him in rich robes, iii., p. 8, but as- 
serts his modesty. It is uncertain whether the golden chair was not in 
the midst of the assembly. See Theodoret, H. Ecc, i., p, 7. 

( 2 ) Ensebius covers the faults of Constantine with panegyric. Gibbon, 
ii., p. 67-72, condenses Zosimus. He doubts the death of Fausta. 



150 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

But when Constantine entered the Council of Nice his life 
was still comparatively spotless. Q He was believed to have 
inherited all the virtues of his excellent father and his pious 
mother. To the simple and holy men who now for the first 
time looked upon their preserver as he modestly besought in- 
stead of commanded their attention, he must have seemed, in 
his humility and his grandeur, half divine. But lately his 
single arm had rescued them from the jaws of a horrible 
death. He had saved the Church from its sorrows, and pub- 
lished the Gospel to mankind. He was the most powerful 
monarch the world had ever known, and his empire spread 
from the Grampian Hills to the ridge of the Atlas, from the 
Atlantic to the Caspian Sea. He was the invincible conquer- 
or, the hero of his age ; yet now monks and solitaries heard 
him profess himself their inferior, a modest catechumen, and 
urge upon his Christian brethren harmony and union. A 
miracle, too — the most direct interference from above since 
the conversion of St. Paul — had thrown around Constantine 
a mysterious charm ; and probably few among the assembled 
bishops but had heard of the cross of light that had outshone 
the sun at noonday, of the inscription in the skies, and of the 
perpetual victory promised to their imperial head.( 2 ) When, 
therefore, Constantine addressed the council, he was heard 
with awe and fond attention. His Christian sentiments con- 
trolled the assembly, and he decided, perhaps against his own 
convictions, the opinions of future ages. 

The council had been summoned by the emperor to deter- 
mine the doctrine of the Church. Heresy was already abun- 
dant and prolific. The opinions of Christians seemed to vary 
according to their origin or nationality. But the acute and 
active intellect of the Greeks, ever busy with the deeper in- 
quiries of philosophy and eager for novelty, had poured forth 
a profusion of strange speculations which alarmed or embar- 



( 1 ) Eutropius, Hist. Rom., x., pp. 6, 7, notices the change — the fall of Con- 
stantine. He is an impartial witness. 

( 2 ) Constantine's dream or vision was affirmed by his oath to Eusebius, 
and was believed by his contemporaries. See Eusebius, Vita Const. 



VARIOUS HERESIES. 151 

rassed the duller Latins. Rome, cold and unimaginative, had 
been long accustomed to receive its abstract doctrines from 
the East, but it seemed quite time that these principles of 
faith should be accurately defined. Heresies of the wildest 
extravagance were widely popular. The Gnostics, or the su- 
perior minds, had covered the plain outline of the Scriptures 
with Platonic commentaries; the theory of eons and of an 
eternal wisdom seemed about to supplant the teachings of 
Paul.Q Among the wildest of the early sectaries were the 
Ophites, or snake-worshipers, who adored the eternal wisdom 
as incarnate in the form of a snake ; and who, at the celebra- 
tion of the sacred table, suffered a serpent to crawl over the 
elements, and to be devoutly kissed by the superstitious Chris- 
tians^ 2 ) The Sethites adored Seth as the Messiah ; the Cain- 
ites celebrated Judas Iscariot as the prince of the apostles; 
Manes introduced from the fire-worship of the Persians a the- 
ory of the conflict of light and darkness, in which Christ con- 
tended as the Lord of Light against the demons of the night ;( 3 ) 
and Montanus boldly declared that he was superior in morali- 
ty to Christ the Messiah and his apostles, and was vigorously 
sustained by the austere Tertullian. Yet these vain fancies 
might have been suffered to die in neglect ; it was a still more 
vital controversy that called forth the assembly at Nice. This 
was no less than the nature of the Deity. ( 4 ) What did the 
Scriptures tell us of that Divine Being who was the author of 
Christianity, and on whom for endless ages the destiny of the 
Church was to rest? The Christian world was divided into 
two fiercely contending parties. On the one side stood Rome, 
Alexandria, and the West ; on the other, Arius, many of the 
Eastern bishops, and perhaps Constantine himself. It is plain, 
therefore, that the emperor was sincere in his profession of 
humility and submission, since he suffered the council to de- 
termine the controversy uninfluenced by superior power. 
A striking simplicity marked the proceedings of the first 

C) See Mosheini, Ecc. Hist., i., p. 169. 

( 2 ) Mosheim, i., p. 180 et seq., and note. 

( 3 ) Id, I, p. 232. ( 4 ) Hefele, i. ; p. 286. 



152 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

council. Hosius, Bishop of Cordova, presided, the only repre- 
sentative of Spain, Gaul, and Britain. A prelate opened the 
meeting with a short address,^) a hymn was sung, then Con- 
stantine delivered his well-timed speech on harmony, and the 
general debate began. It was conducted always with vigor, 
sometimes with rude asperity ; but when the war of recrimi- 
nation rose too high, the emperor, who seems to have attend- 
ed the sittings regularly, would interpose and calm the strife 
by soothing words. The question of clerical marriages was 
discussed, and it was determined, by the arguments of Paph- 
nutius, the Egyptian ascetic, that the lower orders should be 
allowed to marry. The jurisdiction of the bishops was de- 
tined ; all were allowed to be equal ; but Home, Antioch, and 
Alexandria, the chief cities of the empire before Constanti- 
nople was built, held each a certain supremacy. The prima- 
cy of St. Peter was never mentioned ; the worship of Mary, 
Queen of Heaven, was yet unknown ; but the earlier form of 
the Nicene Creed was determined, and Arius was condemned. 
Twenty canons( a ) were passed upon by the council, many of 
which were soon neglected and forgotten ; and when, after 
sitting for two months, the assembly separated, every one felt 
that the genius and eloquence of Athanasius had controlled 
both emperor and Church. 

Before parting from his Christian brothers — his " beloved," 
as he was accustomed to call them — Constantine entertained 
the council at a splendid banquet,( 3 ) and spread before them 
the richest wines and the rarest viands of the East. The un- 
lettered soldier probably shone better in his costly entertain- 
ment than in { debate, where his indifferent Latin and broken 
Greek must have awakened a smile on the grave faces of his 
learned brothers. Here he could flatter and caress with easy 
familiarity ; he was a pleasant companion and a winning host ; 
but we are not told whether he was able to persuade James of 

(*) Eusebins, De Vita Const., iii., p. 11 ; Socrates, i., p. 8. The emperor's 
speech is excellent, and the catechumen was wiser than his superiors. 

( 2 ) The number has been enlarged by numerous additions (see Concilio- 
rnm, ii., p. 233), aud one clause introduced to imply the primacy, ii., p. 236. 

( 3 ) Eusebins, De Vita Const, iii., pp. 15, 16. 






UNION OF THE CHURCH. 153 

IN"isibis to taste his rare dainties, or to entice the anchorites 
of Egypt to his costly wine. The bishops and their followers 
left Nicaea charmed with the courtesy and liberality of their 
master. He had paid all their expenses, and maintained them 
with elegance at Nicsea, had condescended to call them broth- 
ers, and had sent them home by the public conveyances to 
spread everywhere the glad news that an era of peace and 
union awaited the triumphant Church. Q 

Happy delusion ! But it was rudely dissipated. From 
Constantine himself came the fatal blow that tilled all Chris- 
tendom with a perpetual unrest.Q It was the emperor who 
corrupted the Church he had seemed to save. « Soon after the 
council, that dark shadow fell upon Constantine's life which 
was noticed by pagan and Christian observers, and he was 
pointed out by men as a parricide whose sin was inexpiable. 
The pagan Zosimus represents him as asking the priests of the 
ancient faith whether his offense could ever be atoned for by 
their lustrations, and to have been told that for him there was 
no hope; but that the Christians allured him to their com- 
munion by a promise of ample forgiveness. Yet from this 
period the mind of the great emperor grew clouded, and the 
fearful shock of his lost happiness seems to have deadened his 
once vigorous faculties.Q He became a tyrant, made and un- 
made bishops at will, and persecuted all those who had op- 
posed the doctrines of Arius.( 4 ) The Church became a State 
establishment, and all the ills that flow from that unnatural 
union fell upon the hapless Christians. Pride, luxury, and li- 
cense distinguished the haughty bishops, who ruled like princes 
over their vast domains, and who imitated the emperor in per- 
secuting, with relentless vigor, all who differed from them in 

C) Rufinus, Hist. Ecc, i., p. 2 ; Eusebius, De Vita Const., iii., p. 16 ; The- 
odoret, i.,.p. 11. 

( 2 ) Sozoinen, Hist. Ecc, i., p. 20. See Hefele, i., p. 427 et seq. : "Aber das 
haretiscbe Feuer war damit nocb nicbt erstickt." 

( 3 ) His letters (see Socrates, i., p. 9) are wise and not ungentle; bis con- 
duct was different. 

( 4 ) Socrates, i., p. 14. He soon recalled Ensebius of Nicoraedia from ban- 
isbment — a measure of wisdom — but persecutes Atlianasius. 



151 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

faitli. Bishop excommunicated bishop, and fatal anathemas, 
too dreadful to fall from the lips of feeble and dying men, 
were the common weapon of religious controversy. They pre- 
tended to the right of consigning to eternal woe the souls of 
the hapless dissidents. They brought bloodshed and murder 
into the controversies of the Church. Formalism succeeded a 
living faith, and Religion fled from her high station among 
the rulers of Christendom to find shelter in her native scene 
among the. suffering and the poor. There we may trust she 
survived, during this mournful period, the light of the peas- 
ant's cottage or the anchorite's cell. 

Never again did the higher orders of Christendom regain the 
respect of mankind. Constantine himself ,* clothed in Orient- 
al splendor, with painted cheeks, false hair, and a feeble show, 
seems to have sought oblivion for his crime in reckless dissi- 
pation. He became cruel, morose, suspicious. He was al- 
ways fond of religious disputation, and his courtly and ef- 
feminate bishops seem to have yielded to his idle whim. At 
length he died (337), having been baptized not long before 
for the expiation of his sins, and was succeeded by his three 
worthless sons. A period of fierce religious controversy now 
prevailed for many years, of which the resolute hero Ath- 
anasius, Bishop of Alexandria, was the author and the victim.Q 
In 326, Athanasius became the patriarch of that gay, splendid, 
and powerful city, and ruled at times with vigor, but oftener 
was a persecuted exile, hidden in Gaul or among the rocks and 
sands of Egypt. The fire of genius survived in this remark- 
able man the pains of age and the humiliation of exile. He 
never ceased to write, to preach, and to argue with unabated 
power. Constantius became sole emperor, and the chief aim 
of his corrupt reign seems to have been to destroy the influ- 
ence and the opinions of the greatest of polemics. The whole 
Christian world seemed united against Athanasius. The Bish- 
op of Borne, Liberius,( 2 ) and even the pious Hosius, joined 

( 1 ) See Socrates, i., p. 29 et seq., who defends Constantine. 

( 2 ) Milman (Hist. Christianity, ii., p. 431), Mosheiin, and Guericke assert 
the apostasy of the Pope. It is feebly explained by the Romish writers. 
So, too, Athanasius himself asserts it. See Hefele, i., p. 658. 



THE SECOND COUNCIL. 155 

with the imperial faction in renouncing the doctrine of the 
Nicene Council; yet Athanasius, sheltered in the wilds of 
Egypt, maintained the unequal strife, and may be safely said 
to have molded by his vigorous resistance the opinions of all 
succeeding ages. But the period of Anathasius was one upon 
which neither party could look with satisfaction. The princi- 
ples of Christianity were forgotten in the memorable struggle. 
Both factions became bitter persecutors, blood-thirsty and ty- 
rannical. Even Athanasius condescended to duplicity in his 
argument, and cruelty in his conduct ; the most orthodox of 
bishops may be convicted of pious frauds or brutal violence ; 
and the meek and lowly Christians of that unhappy age prob- 
ably gazed with wonder and shame on the crimes and follies 
of their superiors. ( r ) 

The second Ecumenical Council met in the year 381, at Con- 
stantinople, under the reign of Theodosius the Great. The 
story of this famous synod has lately been told by M. De 
Broglie, a moderate Romanist, and the grandson of the gifted 
De Stael.( 2 ) His narrative is trustworthy, although uncritical ; 
and his honest picture of the stormy sessions of the great 
Constantinopolitan Council shows how corrupt, even in his 
guarded opinion, had become the exterior organization of the 
Church. A similar account is given by all the other authori- 
ties. Happily, the people were always better and wiser than 
their rulers. The true Church lived among the humble and 
the poor. The Cathari, or early Protestants, the Waldenses, 
and the Albigenses indicate that moral purity was never whol- 
ly extinct, and that the industry, probity, and progress inculca- 
ted by St. Paul still shed peace and hope over the homes of 
the lowly. There was one eminent intellect, too, of that cor- 
rupt age, educated among the highest ranks of the clergy, who 
has painted with no gentle touch the harsher lineaments of 
the second council.Q Gregory Nazianzen repeats in his let- 

( x ) Mosheim, i., p. 321, notices that most of the noted fathers of this pe- 
riod were capable of pious frauds. 

( 2 ) L'figlise et l'Empire Romain au IV me Siecle, v., p. 403 et seq. 

( 3 ) Gregory, De Vita Sua, and in various poems and orations, describes 
the bishops of his time in no flattering terms. See his poem Ad Episcopos. 



156 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

ters, sermons, and autobiographical poems what was the popu- 
lar conception of the rulers of the Church. Gregory was the 
son of the Bishop of Nazianzus. His youth had been spent 
in study and learned ease. He was himself already the titular 
Bishop of Sasiina, but he had contented himself with assist- 
ing his father in his rustic diocese, and shrunk from public life 
with awkward modesty.Q His wonderful eloquence and vig- 
orous powers seem, however, to have become widely known, 
when a new field was suddenly opened to him for their prac- 
tical employment, which his conscience would not permit him 
to decline. The magnificent city of Constantinople had, ever 
since its foundation, been in the hands of Arian prelates, and 
its crowded churches refused to accept the canons of the Coun- 
cil of Nice. But an orthodox emperor, the rough and honest 
Spanish soldier Theodosius, was now on the Roman throne ; 
and a small band of faithful Athanasians at Constantinople 
thought this a favorable moment for attempting the conver- 
sion of the Imperial City. They looked over the Christian 
world for a suitable pastor. They might have selected Basil 
the Great, but his age and infirmities prevented him from 
leaving his Eastern see ; they sent, therefore, to claim the 
services of Gregory, as the next most eminent of the Oriental 
divines. 

Little did Gregory foresee the cares and woes, the shame 
and disappointment, that lay hidden in his future ! Reluctant- 
ly he accepted the invitation, and left his rustic home to enter 
the luxurious capital. He was already prematurely old and 
infirm. His head was bald, except for a few gray hairs ; his 
figure was bent with age, his appearance insignificant. His 
manner was modest and timid, and no careless observer would 
have discovered in the rustic old man the most splendid and 
successful orator of his age. When Gregory arrived in the 
city he found not one of all its numerous churches open to 
him. Its whole population was hostile, and nobles, artisans, 
monks, and nuns were prepared to argue the rarest questions 

(*) He celebrates his excellent father, his pious mother, and himself. 
Opera, vol. ii., p. 2. 



GREGORY NAZIANZEN. 157 

in theology with eager volubility. Constantinople, in 380, 
rang with religions controversy. The feasts, the baths, the 
Hippodrome, and the most licentious resorts resounded with 
sacred names and thoughts^ 1 ) If a shop-keeper were asked the 
cost of a piece of silk, he would reply by a disquisition on un- 
regenerated being ; if a stranger inquired at a baker's the price 
of bread, he was told, " the Son is subordinate to the Father." 
Into this disputatious population Gregory threw himself bold- 
ly. His orthodox friends had no church to offer him, but they 
provided a large hall or basilica ; an altar was raised at one 
end ; a gallery for women separated them from the men ; 
choristers and deacons attended ; and Gregory, full of hope, 
named his modest chapel Anastasia, the Church of the Resur- 
rection.^) 

His success was indeed unbounded. The building was al- 
ways crowded, the crush at the entrance often terrific ; the 
rails of the chancel were sometimes broken down ; and often 
the crowded congregation broke forth in loud congratulatory 
cheers as they were touched or startled by the eloquent di- 
vine.Q Insensibly Gregory's vanity was inflamed and grati- 
fied by his wide popularity. Standing on his bishop's throne 
in the eastern end of his Anastasia, the church brilliantly 
lighted, his presbyters and deacons in white robes around him, 
a crowded congregation listening with upturned eyes below, 
now fixed in deepest silence and now breaking into loud ap- 
plause, Gregory enjoyed a transient triumph, upon which he 
was fond of dwelling in his later years, when, in the obscurity 
of Nazianzus, he composed his own poetical memoirs. Yet 
he was never safe from the malice of his foes. More than 
once a riotous mob of ferocious monks and nuns, of drunken 
artisans and hungry beggars, broke into the Anastasia, dis- 
turbed its worshipers and the preacher, wounded the neo- 
phytes and priests, and were allowed by the Arian police 
to escape unharmed ; and it was only when Theodosius him- 



O Gregory Naz., Or., p. 22-27. 

( 2 ) De Vita Sua, Opera, ii., p. 17 ; De Broglie, v., p. 408. 

( 3 ) De Broglie, v., p. 382 ; Carm., De Vita Sua, p. 675-700 et seq. 



158 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

self entered the city that the labor of conversion was attended 
with success.Q 

Theodosius was no hesitating missionary. He called before 
him Demophilus, the Arian bishop, and ordered him to recant 
his errors or resign. The honest bishop at once gave np his 
office. The see was now vacant. A wild Egyptian fanatic or 
impostor, Maximus, had already bribed the people to elect 
him their bishop ; but the next day they had repented of their 
folly, and resolved to force Gregory into the vacant see. 
They dragged him in their arms to the episcopal chair. He 
struggled to escape, he refused to sit down, the women wept, 
the children cried out in their mothers' arms, and at last Greg- 
ory consented to be their bishop. ( 2 ) Maximus, however, still 
claimed the see. Demophilus had not yet been deposed, when 
Damasus, the Bishop of Rome, advised Theodosius to summon 
the second General Council. But the affair of the bishopric 
the soldier-emperor resolved to decide in his own way. He 
deposed Demophilus, expelled Maximus, and, amidst the gen- 
eral lamentation of the Arian city, on a clouded day in No- 
vember, carried the pale and trembling Gregory to the Church 
of the Apostles, where Constantine and his successors lay en- 
tombed, and proclaimed him bishop. Just then, it is said, the 
wintry clouds parted and a bright sunbeam covered Gregory's 
bare head with glory. The crowded congregation accepted 
the omen, and cried out, " Long live our bishop Gregory."( 3 ) 

To confirm or annul Gregory's election, and to correct the 
creed of the day, were the objects for which the second Gen- 
eral Council assembled. If we may trust Gregory's account 
of it, which he wrote in the obscure but not tranquil retire- 
ment of Nazianzus, we must conclude that it could scarcely 
compare favorably in moral excellence with that of Nice. A 
canonized saint, he rails against the bishops of his age.( 4 ) All 
the gluttons, villains, and false-swearers of the empire, he ex- 

(*) De Broglie, v., p. 394. See Gregory's dream of the Anastasia. 

( 2 ) De Broglie, v., p. 409. 

( 3 ) De Vita Sua, p. 1355-1390. See Migne, Pat. Gra3C, xxxvii., pp. 1177 ; 
1234. 

( 4 ) Ad Epis. (ii. ; p. 824-829), Cariuen vii. 



A COUNCIL VITUPERATED. 159 

claims, had been convoked in the council. The bishops were 
]ow-born and illiterate, peasants, blacksmiths, deserters from 
the army, or reeking from the holds of ships ; and when in 
the midst of his vituperation the elegant Gregory remember- 
ed that of the same class of humble and unlearned men were 
the authors of his faith : " Yes," he cried, " they were true 
apostles ; but these are time-servers and flatterers of the great, 
long -bearded hypocrites, and pretended devotees, who have 
neither intellect nor faith."Q Of ecumenical councils the 
priestly satirist had but an indifferent opinion. Councils and 
congresses, he said, were the cause of many evils. " I will not 
sit in one of those councils of geese and cranes," he exclaimed. 
" I fly from every meeting of bishops ; for I never saw a good 
end to any, but rather an increase of evils." It is indeed dif- 
ficult to see how the canonized Gregory, had he attended the 
synods of Trent or Constance, could have escaped the fate of 
Huss or Jerome. Yet in the Second Council were gathered 
several eminent and excellent men. Among them were Greg- 
ory of Nyssa, a high authority in the Church, and the worthy 
brother of Basil the Great ; Melitius, the gentle Bishop of An- 
tioch, who presided at the council at the emperor's request ;( 2 ) 
Cyril, the aged Bishop of Jerusalem ; and many others who 
scarcely deserved the bitter taunts of Gregory. But Melitius 
died soon after the opening of the council, and Gregory, who 
had been confirmed in his bishopric, presided as Patriarch of 
Constantinople. He was at the summit of his glory ; his fall 
drew near. His vigorous honesty, his bitter denunciation, had 
made him many enemies, and it was suddenly discovered that 
there was a fatal flaw in his election. By an obsolete canon 
of the Nicene Council, which had been constantly violated 
ever since its passage, no bishop could be translated from one 
see to another ; and Gregory was already the Bishop of Sasi- 
ma. The objection was made ; the jealous council condemned 
their greatest orator; and the indignant bishop, deprived of 
his see, a disgraced and fallen churchman, was sent back to 

(*) Ad Epis., Migne, xxxvii., p. 1177, and see p. 226. 

( 2 ) De Broglie, v., p. 425, excuses the presidency of Melitius. 



160 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

the repose of Nazianzus.Q Theodosius lamented his loss, but 
refused to interfere in the clerical dispute. A few friends 
shared in Gregory's indignation. In his rural retirement he 
wrote those sharp diatribes on the Eastern bishops which in- 
troduce us to the clerical life of Constantinople, as those of 
his friend Jerome depict the vices and follies of Rome. Both 
capitals seem to have been equally tainted and impure. 

The council now wanted a head, and Theodosius at once ap- 
pointed Nectarius, a magistrate of the city, to the holy office 
of Patriarch of Constantinople. If Gregory had been ineligi- 
ble, his successor was still more so. He had never been bap- 
tized, was not even a Christian, and his morals were not such 
as to fit him for the apostolic place. But the emperor insist- 
ed, the bishop was baptized, and his vices were hidden in the 
splendor of his patriarchal court. He presided at the council, 
which now hastened to finish its sittings. The real influence 
of the Council of Constantinople on the opinions of the Church 
was not important ; its decisions were rejected at Rome and 
neglected by its contemporaries. The " Creed of Constanti- 
nople," which has been erroneously ascribed to it, was proba- 
bly the work of Epiphanius or Gregory of Nyssa.( 2 ) The 
council condemned a vast number of heresies; it raised the 
see of Constantinople to the second rank in Christendom, 
next to Rome, and suggested the principle that the dignity of 
the patriarch was to be determined by the importance of the 
city over which he ruled. Constantinople was now second 
only to Rome ; and as the latter declined in power, we find the 
bishop of the Eastern capital first claiming an equality with 
the ancient see, and then, finally, seeking to subject the bar- 
barous West to his own authority by declaring himself the 
Universal Bishop.( 3 ) The emperor, Theodosius, whose vigor 
had controlled most of the proceedings of the council, now, as 
head of the Church, affirmed its authority by an imperial de- 

( x ) De Broglie, v., p. 442. Gregory delivered a fine address in parting. 
See his congratulatory letter to Nectarius, Ep., p. 88. Migne, xxxvii., p. 162. 

( 2 ) De Broglie even adds ihefilioque, which was not heard of until a cent- 
ury or more later, v., p. 450, and note. 

( 3 ) Milman, Hist. Lat. Christianity, i., p. 211. 



POPE DAM ASUS. 161 

cree.Q The " one hundred and fifty fathers," as they have 
been called, left Constantinople in the hot days of July, 381, 
for their various homes. The war of controversy had ceased ; 
but the fierce disputes, the bitter invectives, the unchristian 
violence, and the infamous morals of many of the mem- 
bers of the Second Council are preserved to us by the un- 
sparing satires of the honest but vindictive Gregory of Nazi- 
anzus. 

It might seem to the Christian or the man of thought a 
matter of little consequence what the corrupt priests and bish- 
ops of this distant period said or imagined of their own pre- 
rogatives and powers ; and no subtlety of argument can con- 
vert into a successor of the apostles the fierce and blood- 
thirsty Damasus,( 2 ) Bishop of Rome, the dissolute Patriarch of 
Constantinople, or the ambitious and unprincipled prelates of 
Antioch and Alexandria ; but it may be safely said that each 
asserted a perfect independence of the other, and that the 
Bishop of Rome as yet held no general control in the exterior 
church. The wars and rivalries of the ambitious prelates, in- 
deed, might almost convince us that Christian virtue had 
wholly died out, did not various casual notices of the histori- 
ans of the time direct us to a different conclusion. The pa- 
gan, Ammianus Marcellinus, in his scornful picture of the 
luxury and vice of the clergy of Rome,( 3 ) points to a pleasing 
contrast in the conduct of the rural priests. They, at least, 
lived in a purity and simplicity worthy of the best days of 
the Church; they, perhaps, with their rustic congregations, 
were the true successors of the apostles. ( 4 ) Gregory of Na- 
zianzus and Jerome confirm and illustrate his narrative. The 
Church still lived among the people ; and while angry bishops 
raged in stormy councils, or hurled anathemas against each 
other in haughty supremacy, the good Samaritan still softened 
the hearts of humble Christians ; the cup of cold water was 

C) Hefele, u., pp. 27, 28. 

( 2 ) Rufinns, i., p. 10, describes the bloody scenes at Rome. 

( 3 ) A. Thierry, Saint Jerome, i., p. 21. 

( 4 ) Ammianus, xxvii., pp. 3, 14: "Tennitas edendi potandique parcis- 
sirue," etc. 

11 



162 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

still given to the weary and the sad; the merciful and the 
meek of every land were still united in a saintly and eternal 
brotherhood. Christian morality began to assert a wonderful 
power ; the people everywhere grew purer and better. The 
barbarous gladiatorial shows were abolished ; licentious spec- 
tacles no longer pleased; the vices of paganism disappeared; 
the sacred bond of marriage was observed ; slavery, which had 
destroyed the Roman republic, was tending to its decay ; and 
some future historian of the Church, neglecting the strife of 
bishops and councils, may be able to trace a clear succession 
of apostolic virtue from the days of Gregory and Jerome to 
those of Wycliffe, Huss, and Luther. 

The third and fourth Ecumenical Councils grew out of 
a fierce struggle for supremacy between the Patriarchs of 
Alexandria and Constantinople.^) Cyril of Alexandria, vio- 
lent, ambitious, and unscrupulous, ruled over a wide and pros- 
perous patriarchate. The city of Alexandria, in the decline 
of the Roman empire, was still (431) the centre of letters and 
of trade. Rome had been ravaged and desolated by the Goth 
and the Yandal, and was fast sinking into a new barbarism ; 
Constantinople, under its feeble emperors, trembled at each 
movement of the savage tenants of the European wilderness; 
but Alexandria was untouched by the barbarian, and its gifted 
bishop reigned supreme over the swarming population of the 
Egyptian diocese. He had resolved to crush Nestorius, Patri- 
arch of Constantinople. It was the famous Nestorian con- 
troversy which gave rise to a Christian sect that still exists in 
its ancient seats. Nestorius refused to apply to the Virgin 
Mary the name of " Mother of God." Cyril denounced him 
with bitter malignity,( 2 ) and began a holy war which he had 
resolved should end in the destruction of his powerful rival. 
Between the two hostile patriarchs, indeed, there seems to 
have been little difference in character or in Christian mod- 
eration, and NestoriusQ had persecuted with unsparing hand 

( 1 ) Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, i., p. 160 ; Baronius, v., p. 682. 

( 2 ) Conciliorum, v., p. 6. 

( 3 ) For the cruelties of Nestorius, see Socrates, vii., p. 29. 



CYRIL AND RYPATIA. 163 

the hapless dissidents within his see. But he had scarcely 
equaled the vindictive cruelty of Cyril. Alexandria had al- 
ready witnessed, under the rule of its intolerant master, a 
severe persecution of the gentle Novatians, whose simple pie- 
ty seems to have attracted the bitter hatred of the ambitious 
prelates of the age ; and Cyril himself led a throng of fanatics 
to the plunder and destruction of the harmless and wealthy 
Jews.Q Forty thousand of the unhappy Israelites were 
banished from the city they had enriched ; and when Orestes, 
the Roman prefect, complained of the persecuting bishop to 
the emperor, a mob of monks assailed him in the street, and 
one of them, Ammonius, struck him on the head with a 
stone.( 2 ) The people drove off the monks, and Orestes order- 
ed Ammonius to be put to torture. He died, but Cyril buried 
him with holy honors, and enrolled his name among the band 
of martyrs. Sober Christians, says Socrates, condemned Cy- 
ril's conduct, but a still deeper disgrace soon fell upon the Al- 
exandrian Church from the rivalry of Cyril and Orestes. The 
fair Hypatia, the daughter of the philosopher Theron, had 
won the respect as well as the admiration of Alexandria by 
her beauty, her eloquence, and her modest life. With rare 
clearness and force she explained before splendid audiences 
the pure doctrines of Plato, and proved, by her refined and 
graceful oratory, that the gift of genius might be found in ei- 
ther sex. She was the rival of Cyril in eloquence, and the 
friend of his enemy Orestes, and her dreadful doom awoke 
the sympathy of Christians as well as pagans. The fierce and 
bigoted followers of Cyril dragged her from her carriage as 
she was returning to her home, tore her body to pieces, and 
burned her mangled limbs; and it was believed, even by 
Christian historians, that the jealous patriarch was not alto- 
gether innocent of a share in the doom of his gentle and ac- 
complished rival. ( 3 ) 

(*) Socrates, Hist. Ecc, vii., p. 13. 

( 2 ) Gibbon exaggerates the assault into a volley of siones, Decline and 
Fall, iv., p. 460 ; but Socrates, vii., p. 14, mentions only one. 

( 3 ) Socrates, vii., p. 16, denounces the murder as an opprobrium to Cy- 
ril and the Church. 



164 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

Cyril denounced and anathematized Nestorius ; Celestine, 
Bishop of Rome, joined him in his war against the Bishop of 
Constantinople, degraded Nestorius from his episcopal dignity, 
and asserted the divine honors of Mary as the mother of God. 
The feeble emperor, Theodosius the Younger, alarmed by the 
furious rage of his powerful prelates, but friendly to Nesto- 
rius, summoned an assembly of the Christian world to decide 
the nice distinction. Ephesus was chosen as a convenient 
place for the meeting of the Third Council, and in June, 431, 
the rival factions began to gather in the magnificent city of 
Diana, now destined to become renowned for the triumph of 
the holier Virgin. Q Yet to the sincere Christians of this un- 
happy age the conduct and character of the members of the 
Third Council could have brought only disappointment and 
shame. In vain the gentle Theodosius implored his patri- 
archs and bishops to exercise the common virtues of forbear- 
ance and self-respect ; in vain he placed over them a guard of 
soldiers to insure an outward peace. The streets of the mag- 
nificent city were filled with riot and bloodshed ; the rival 
factions fought for the honor of Mary or the supremacy of 
the hostile sees. Cyril, violent and resolute to rule, had come 
from Alexandria, followed by a throng of bishops, priests, and 
a host of fanatics ; Nestorius relied for his safety on the pro- 
tection of the imperial guard ; but to neither could the Chris- 
tian world attribute any one of the virtues enjoined by its 
holy faith.( 2 ) The Patriarch of Alexandria refused to wait 
for the coming of the Oriental bishops, and at once assembled 
a synod of his own adherents, and proceeded to try and con- 
demn his rival. Restoring protested; the emperor's legate, 
Candidian, who asked for a delay of four days, was driven 
with insult from the hostile assembly. The bishops delivered 
their opinions ; Cyril presided ; and at the close of a single 
day Nestorius was degraded, a convicted heretic ; and the city 

C) Concil., v., p. 7. Baronius, v., p. 682, raises the number of bishops to 
over two hundred. 

C) Milman, Hist. Lat. Chris., i., p. 133-140. For a full account of the 
council see Hefele, Zweiter Band, p. 162 et seq. 



THE FALLEN CHURCH. 165 

of Ephesus resounded with songs of triumph over the fall of 
the enemy of Mary.Q 

It is painful, indeed, to contemplate the angry strife that 
rent the corrupt Church of this early period, yet it is not dif- 
ficult to discover its cause. The Church, in its exterior form, 
had long been the instrument of the State ; the bishops and 
patriarchs were the representatives of the vices and the in- 
trigues of the imperial court. They had become earthly 
princes, instead of messengers from heaven. Their pomp and 
luxury shocked and alienated the true believer, and they had 
long abandoned every one of the principles of charity and be- 
nevolence inculcated by the faith they professed. The unity 
of the Church had been lost in the contentions of its chiefs, 
and even in Constantinople itself three rival bishops ruled 
over their separate adherents. The Cathari, or Novatians, the 
Protestants of this corrupt period, departing from the estab- 
lished church, had retained their organization ever since the 
age of Constantine ;( 2 ) the pure and spotless lives of their 
bishops, Agelius, Chrysanthus, and Paul, formed a pleasing 
contrast to the vices of Nectarius or Nestorius ; and the mod- 
est virtues of this persecuted sect awakened the envy and the 
hatred of the orthodox bishops of Eome and Constantinople. 
The Novatians rejected the authority of the imperial patri- 
arch, but they observed the Nicene Creed. They lived holy 
lives in the midst of persecution or temptation. Chrysan- 
thus,^) the Novatian bishop of Constantinople, distributed his 
private fortune among the poor, and his only salary was two 
loaves of bread on each Lord's day from the contributions of 
the faithful. The Novatian Ablabius was one of the most 
elegant and vigorous preachers of the day ;( 4 ) the pious Paul 
was the friend of the prisoners and of the poor.( 6 ) An Arian 
bishop also presided at Constantinople, and in their sufferings 
his followers learned virtue and self-restraint. It was against 

(*) Hefele, ii., p. 173: "Die Sitzung hatte von Morgens friih bis in die 
Nacht hinein gedauert." Nestorius was called a new Judas. 

C) Socrates, H. E., v., p. 12-21. See Sozomen, i., p. 22, for the boldness of 
a Novatian. 

( 3 ) Socrates, H. E., vii., p. 12. ( 4 ) Id. ( 5 ) Id., p. 17. 



166 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

these rival sects that Nestorius had first turned his persecuting 
rage. He envied the spotless fame, the general love that fol- 
lowed the gentle Novatian bishop, Paul, as he passed through 
the city to intercede for the prisoner or to relieve the sick ; he 
destroyed the Arian churches ; and he deserved, by his cruel 
intolerance, the fatal doom which Cyril had prepared for him 
at Ephesus. 

But Cyril's triumphs at the council seemed about to be 
turned into a defeat by the arrival of John, Bishop of Antioch, 
and the Oriental bishops, who at once denied the validity of 
the condemnation of Nestorius. Two rival councils sat at the 
same time in the City of the Virgin,^) and the streets were 
again filled with riot and bloodshed by the contending fac- 
tions. Churches were stormed and defended; the imperial 
guards fled before an angry mob ; and for three months Cyril 
and Nestorius opposed each other with an almost equal pros- 
pect of success, and with all the weapons of corruption, vio- 
lence, and fraud. ( 2 ) The Emperor Theodosius, the gentlest of 
rulers, was at length enraged at the vindictive fury of the 
holy council. He sent the disorderly prelates to their homes, 
and recommended them to amend by their private virtues the 
injury and scandal they had inflicted on the Church. But the 
malevolence of Cyril was insatiable. His intrigues and his 
bribes won over the courtiers of Constantinople ; and Nesto- 
rius, the haughtiest of patriarchs except his rival, was sent 
into exile, and died a convicted heretic. His name and his 
doctrine still survive in a sect of Oriental Christians, who are 
perhaps the natural fruit of the persecuting spirit of Cyril and 
the intolerant rule of the famous Council of Ephesus. 

The heresy of Nestorius gave rise to the fourth General 
Council, at Chalcedon, by exciting a speculation directly op- 
posed to his own.( 8 ) Eutyches, an aged monk, the chief or 
abbot of the ascetic throng of Constantinople, and a faithful 

C) Baronins, v., p. 687-719, looks upon Nestorius as a raging monster — a 
dragon or a fiend. 

( 2 ) Evagrius, Hist. Ecc., i., pp. 4, 5. 

( 3 ) Milman, Hist. Latin Christianity, i., p. 204 ; Gibbon, iv., p. 476. 



DIOSCOBUS AND HIS BOBBERS. 167 

follower of Cyril, proposed, in opposition to the two natures 
of Christ asserted by the ISTestorians, a theory of the perfect 
union of the spiritual nature with the human. He was shock- 
ed to find himself denounced as a heretic, yet he boldly main- 
tained his opinion. Q Cyril was dead; his successor, Diosco- 
rus, Patriarch of Alexandria, defended the theory of Eutyches. 
He was even more unscrupulous than his predecessor. His 
vices, his cruelty, and his ambition filled the Christian world 
with tumult. A synod met at Ephesus to decide the contro- 
versy. Dioscorus was present with a horde of monks, robbers, 
and assassins ; the trembling bishops were forced by the vio- 
lence of the Egyptians to adopt the opinion of Eutyches, and 
the " Robber Synod," as it was called, from the savage natures 
of its members, seemed to have fixed the rule of orthodoxy. 
But Leo the Great was now Bishop of Rome, and the oppo- 
nent of Attila did not fear the wild anchorets of Egypt. A 
general council was summoned at his request, to meet in Oc- 
tober, 451, at Chalcedon. Senators and nobles were mingled 
with the priestly throng to restrain their tumultuous im- 
pulses^ 2 ) in the magnificent church of St. Euphemia, on the 
shores of the Thracian Bosphorus, Rvq hundred bishops at- 
tended; the haughty Dioscorus was tried by his peers, and 
convicted of innumerable vices and crimes; he was deposed 
from his sacred office, and the aspiring Bishop of Borne re- 
joiced in the fall of his powerful rival. For the first time, 
perhaps, the Mcene Creed was chanted as we have it to-day ; 
the Eutychian heresy was condemned in the person of its chief 
defender : and various canons were passed that served to de- 
fine the usages of the Church. Yet Leo's triumph was mar- 
red by a memorable incident. Among the regulations in- 
troduced by the council was one that raised the see of Con- 
stantinople to an equality, in some particulars at least, with 
that of Rome ; it asserted that the dignity of the city deter- 



( x ) Concil. Chalcedonse, Labbei, viii., p. 4 : " Incredibile est, quanta 
animi aeerbitate ac rabie exarsit Eutyches." Hefele, ii., p. 361. 

( 2 ) Concil., Labbei, iv., p. 766 : " Turbas comprimerent." See Evagrius, 
ii., p. 3. 



168 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

mined that of its patriarch, and openly expressed what had 
been implied at the Second Council-Q Leo rejected the can- 
ons with disdain; he asserted with rage and violence the 
primacy of Peter ; but the incident is important as showing 
what was the opinion of this superstitious age as to the ori- 
gin of the papal elaims.Q Another result of the Council of 
Chalcedon was the creation of a sect, the Monophysites, who 
still retain the dogma condemned by the synod, and whose 
faith still lingers among the Copts and the Abyssinians. So 
powerless are councils to produce a general unity of belief ! 

A Bishop of Eome, Yigilius, lent his sanction to the fifth 
Ecumenical Council, and its general character may be inferred 
from the life and conduct of its head. Yigilius was the creat- 
ure and the victim of the corrupt women who ruled over the 
court of the feeble Justinian. He was accused of having 
caused the death of his predecessor, the gentle Silverius ; of 
having killed his own nephew by incessant scourging ; of be- 
ing a notorious murderer, stained by countless crimes. He 
fled from Eome, pursued by the maledictions of its people. 
They threw volleys of stones after him as he left the city, and 
cried, " Evil thou hast done to us — evil attend thee wherever 
thou goest 1"( 3 ) At Constantinople he met with still worse 
treatment. His vacillation or his insincerity displeased his 
corrupt patrons ; he was dragged through the streets with a 
rope around his neck ; was shut up in the common jail, and 
fed on bread and water ; and, at length, the unlucky pontiff, 
having in vain sacrificed his conscience to the tyranny of 
Justinian, died a miserable outcast at Syracuse.Q The papal 
dignity had evidently sunk low in this degenerate age ; and 
one can not avoid contrasting the humble slave, Yigilius, with 

(*) Concil., Labbei, iv., p. 767. The Jesuit editors say "second" to 
Rome ; but why, then, Leo's indignation ? 

( 2 ) It is said that this canon was passed by a few bishops, and not by 
the whole council (Milman, Hist. Lat. Christ., i., p. 211); but it still in- 
dicates that the papal theory was not yet established. 

( 3 ) Milman, i., p. 340 et seq. 

( 4 ) Hefele, ii., p. 824 et seq., gives a full account of the council. Vigilius 
was forced to confirm the acts of the council. 






POPE HONORIUS THE HERETIC. 169 

the haughty Gregories and Innocents who ruled over nion- 
archs and nations, and who so barbarously avenged his fate. 
Justinian ruled alone at the Fifth Council (553), and Pope and 
bishops were the servile instruments of the vicious court. The 
last, the sixth General Council, assembled in 680, at Constan- 
tinople. The emperor or Pope Agatho presided ; a throng of 
bishops attended ; a band of soldiers enforced good order ; 
and a fierce anchorite of the Monothelite faith attempted to 
perform a miracle as a proof of the sanctity of his creed. But 
the dead refused to come to life under his illusive spells ; the 
Monothelite doctrine was condemned by the united council ; 
and the faith in the infallibility of the papacy was forever 
shattered by the conviction of Pope Honorius as a heretic.Q 
If a Pope can be a heretic, how can he be infallible ? If his 
inspiration can once fail, when can we be ever sure of his per- 
fect truth ? Or if Pope Honorius erred in becoming the pa- 
tron of the Monothelite creed, may we not conclude that Pope 
Pius IX. is wrong in opposing free schools and a free press ? 
The sixth General Council offers a happy precedent for a 
general synod of the nineteenth century. ( 2 ) 

There now occurs in the course of history that solemn and 
instructive spectacle, the decline and death of the European 
intellect. Knowledge ceased to be powerful ; the ignorant 
races subdued the intellectual ; a brutal reign of violence fol- 
lowed ; and truth, honor, probity, industry, genius, seemed to 
have fled forever from the nations of Europe, to find their 
home with the Saracen or the Turk. From the seventh to the 
twelfth century the Arabs were the only progressive race. In 
Europe, by a strange perversion of common reason, to labor 
was held dishonorable ; to rob the laborer was held the priv- 
ilege of noble birth. ( 3 ) The feudal system was a not unskill- 
ful device to maintain a warrior caste at the cost of the labor- 

(*) Mosheim, i., p. 536, and note ; Milman, Lat. Christianity, ii., p. 137. 

( 2 ) For the authorities on the condemnation of Honorius see Hefele, 
Con., iii., p. 264-284. The support of heresy, Honorius was vigorously 
anathematized. 

( 3 ) The Middle-age chroniclers seem to have hated the "svorking-class in- 
tensely. See Commines, v., p. 5 ; Monstrelet. 



170 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

ing class ; and the merchant, the scholar, the mechanic, and the 
inventor became serfs or villeins, whose scanty earnings were 
freely snatched from them to sustain the indolent license of 
their warrior lords. Q Industry died out, and with it fell its 
natural offspring — the intellect. The warrior caste could nei- 
ther read nor write ; the miserable serfs had no leisure for 
mental improvement ; while priests, monks, and bishops aban- 
doned the study of classic literature, and, when they could 
read, employed their idle hours in conning their breviaries or 
in spelling out miraculous legends of the saints. In this dark 
period grew up the monastic system, the worship of images 
and relics, the adoration of Mary, the supremacy of Rome. 

Heresies, indeed, had ceased to exist, except the greatest of 
them all, the papal assumption ; and general councils were no 
longer held. A chain of circumstances had tended to make 
Home the master of the intellect and the conscience of Eu- 
rope. Its ancient rivals, the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Anti- 
och, and Jerusalem, had sunk into feeble subjects of the fol- 
lowers of Mohammed. ~No Cyril any longer thundered his 
anathemas from amidst his swarming hosts of Egyptian monks 
and bishops ; no vigorous opponents of the papal assumptions 
arose among the persecuted Christians of Syria and the East. 
A feeble patriarch reigned at Constantinople, who faintly de- 
fied his Italian brother, and chanted an uninterpolated creed ;( 2 ) 
but the whole Western world obeyed implicitly the spiritual 
tyrant at Rome, and the pure faith and morality of the age 
were lost to sight, and were hidden, perhaps, in the cottages of 
the Yaudois and amidst the glens and defiles of the Pyrenees. 

The monastic system had now assumed a strange and over- 
whelming importance. Rome ruled by its monasteries, and 
over every part of Europe a countless throng of these clerical 
fortresses had arisen, engrossing the richest lands, drawing in 
the young and ardent, cultivating the grossest superstition, and 



(*) The Norman knights gave away carpenters and blacksmiths as pres- 
ents. See Ingulphus, p. 174. The Norman kings sometimes presented 
their courtiers with a wealthy merchant. 

( 2 ) The Latins now added the filioqiie. 



THE MONASTIC RULE. 171 

forming, from Monte Casino to Croyland or Melrose, the firm- 
est defense of the papal rule. In the third century a Paul and 
an Anthony, the famous solitaries of Egypt, had begun the 
system by their example of a perfect seclusion from the world, 
and often the gentle hermits were the purest, if not the most 
useful, of their race.Q A pale, slight, sickly, but impassioned 
and gifted missionary of the new practice, the austere, the bit- 
ter Jerome, had defended and propagated monasticism by his 
vigorous pen and his holy life.( 2 ) But Jerome at least taught 
his followers to labor with their hands, to dress plainly but 
neatly, to read, perhaps to think. ( 3 ) A Benedict and Pope 
Gregory the Great helped to spread the system over the "West. 
Its rules of austerity, seclusion, celibacy, and ignorance grew 
rigid and immovable, and the monastery became the model 
of the Roman Church. Celibacy, which had been condemned 
by the gentle ascetic Paphnutius at the Council of Nice, who 
proclaimed marriage honorable, was now enforced upon every 
priest.Q The iron Hildebrand tore wives from their hus- 
bands, destroyed the happiness of countless families, and de- 
nounced the married clergy in every land : the priest was con- 
verted into a monk. The Roman Church demanded a perfect 
submission from its servants. But the monastic system, which 
had seemed so harmless or so meritorious in its earlier adher- 
ents, began now to show its more dangerous aspect. Monas- 
teries and nunneries filled the cities and the open country of 
Europe. They possessed half the arable land of England, and 
drew in the wealth of Germany and France. They grew rich 
by bequests and charities, lawsuits, forgeries, and fraud.Q 
The monks were noted for their avarice, indolence, license, 

(*) The monks cultivated at first the useful arts. Sozomen, Hist. Ecc, 
i. ;P .12. 

( 2 ) See A. Thierry's Saint Jerome, i., p. 145. An excellent portrait. 

( 3 ) See Jerome, Regula Monachorum, cap. xiv. : "Si monachus esse vis, 
non videri," etc. They were to dress plainly, cap. xvii., to plaut, to sow, to 
labor. 

( 4 ) Sozomen, i., p. 23. 

( 6 ) The forged charters and perpetual lawsuits of Croyland show how 
the acute abbots enlarged their wealth. Ingulphus, Chron., Introduct. 



172 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

and encroaching pride. They crushed literature, discouraged 
industry, despised the claims of labor ; and no burden pressed 
more heavily upon the working-men of the Middle Ages than 
the general prevalence of the monastic system. A selfish and 
useless isolation made the monks the prey of idle fancies and 
superstitious dreams. They sustained the worship of images 
against the common-sense of Leo and Charlemagne, asserted 
the claims of the Yirgin, and defended the tyranny of the 
Pope. A monk invented the Spanish Inquisition; another 
founded that of Rome ; one produced the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew ; a Jesuit drove the Huguenots from France ; and 
scarcely one of those horrible persecutions and bloody wars 
that have made the name of Rome odious among nations but 
may be traced to the bitter and blind superstition engendered 
by the monkish rule. 

A still darker infamy surrounded the convent and the nun- 
nery.Q Within their gloomy walls the abbot or superior 
reigned supreme ; no person was permitted to hold intercourse 
with the monks and nuns; their nearest relatives were ex- 
cluded forever from their sight; a severe discipline made 
them the slaves of the abbot or the confessor, and deeds of 
violence and crime, faintly whispered in the public ear, in- 
creased the unpopularity of the monastic system. At length, 
in the sixteenth century, the mighty voice of Luther awak- 
ened attention to the growing enormity ; nation after nation 
threw off the terrible superstition, broke up its monasteries, 
and drove their swarming population to useful labor. Italy 
has just expelled its monks, to turn the monasteries into alms- 
houses and public schools ; Spain follows in its path ; and it 
is possible that these dangerous prisons of the young and the 
fair may be permitted to exist in all their mediaeval enormity 
only on the free soil of America or on the streets of Cracow. 
It seems, indeed, unsafe that they should be suffered to multi- 
ply anywhere, unless placed under the constant supervision of 
the State. 



C) For the gay license of Port Royal see Sainte - Beuve, Port Royal, i. 
For a darker picture of an early period, Harduin, Con., i., p. 1398. 



MONKISH RULE. 173 

From the seventh to the sixteenth century the monks ruled 
the world. The haughtiest and most hated of the Popes, a 
Hildebrand or an Innocent III., were monks, and every as- 
sembly of the papal bishops was controlled in its deliberations 
by the monkish rule. In a Seventh Council (746), whose 
ecumenicity might well be admitted, image - worship was con- 
demned, and images declared the instruments of Satan. Q The 
monks rebelled ; the Pope led them against the emperor and 
the Church ; a new council was assembled at Mce ; and the 
indispensable idols were restored and defended hi language 
that was adopted in the Council of Trent. Charlemagne dic- 
tated, he could not write, four books against the popular su- 
perstition, and the bishops of the East and the West seem to 
have sustained the imperial faith; yet the monks and the 
Popes were successful, after a conflict of a century.( 2 ) We 
have no space to notice the various papal councils of this dark 
period ; the warrior caste of the Middle Ages submitted de- 
voutly to the monkish rule ; and a war of extermination was 
incessantly waged against that large body of enlightened and 
humble Christians who, under the name of Yaudois, Lollards, 
or Cathari, seem in every age to have preserved the pure traits 
of the Gospel faith. At length, however, a council was held 
whose important results deserve a momentary attention. 
Pope Urban II., in 1095, assembled at Clermont and Placen- 
tia an immense host of priests, knights, nobles, and princes, 
and preached in glowing eloquence the duty of snatching the 
Holy Places from the control of the iconoclastic Saracens. 
Europe caught his superstitious ardor, and for more than two 
centuries continued to pour forth its wealth of manly and 
martial vigor in a wasteful frenzy on the plains of Syria. 
The Curtian gulf was never filled. The energy of nations, 
which, if directed to honest labor and practical improvement, 
might have civilized and cultivated the world, was squander- 
ed in obedience to the cruel suggestions of a monkish dream- 
er. The Cathari or dissenters wrote, spoke, or preached 
against the wild delusion; they asserted that the Christian 

O Milman, Hist. Lat. Christ., ii. ; p. 171. ( 2 ) Id., ii., p. 184. 



174: ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

had no right to kill even a Saracen, and that the true way of 
spreading the Gospel in the East was by the gentle persuasion 
of a holy life. Their remonstrances were answered by the 
rude denunciations of the papal preachers, by the whip, the 
torture, and the stake. War and bloodshed became the chief 
employment of the Papal Church and its martial adherents, 
and for two centuries the Popes maintained their place at the 
head of Christendom by exciting general massacres of the 
Protestants of Provence or Piedmont, and by driving the 
young generations of Europe to the charnel-house of the East. 
One of the most startling effects of this monkish delusion 
was the Crusade of the little children. A band of fifty thou- 
sand children from Germany and France set out in 1212 to 
redeem the Holy Sepulchre. A peasant child of Vendome 
first assumed the cross in France, and soon an increasing 
throng of boys and girls gathered around him as he passed 
from Paris to the South, and with a touching simplicity de- 
clared that they meant to go to Jerusalem to deliver the sep- 
ulchre of the Saviour. Q Their parents and relations in vain 
endeavored to dissuade them ; they escaped from their homes ; 
they wandered away without money or means of subsistence ; 
and they believed that a miracle would dry up the Mediter- 
ranean Sea and enable them to pass safely to the shores of 
Syria. At length a body of seven thousand of the French 
children reached Marseilles, and here they met with a strange 
and unlooked-for doom, At Marseilles were slave-traders who 
were accustomed to purchase or steal children in order to sell 
them to the Saracens. Two of these monsters, Ferrers and 
Porcus, engaged to take the young Crusaders to the Holy Land 
without charge, and they set sail in seven ships for the East.Q 
Two of the vessels were sunk on the passage with all their 
passengers ; the others arrived safely, and the unhappy chil- 
dren were sold by their betrayers in the slave-markets of Al- 

( x ) This strange event is well attested. See Geschichte der Kreuzziige, 
Wilken, vi., p. 7 : " So wnnderbar diese Erscheiuung war, so ist sie doch 
durch die Zeugnisse glaubwiirdiger Gescuichtschreiber so fest begrundet," 
etc. And Michaud, ii., p. 202. 

( 2 ) Wilken, vi., pp. 81, 82. 



COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE. 175 

exandria or Cairo. Other large bodies of children came from 
Germany across the Alps. Many perished from hunger, heat, 
disease : a few were enabled to die on the sacred soil of Syria ; 
and it is estimated that fifty thousand of the flower of Eu- 
ropean youth were lost in this most remarkable of the Cru- 
sades. ■ 

Constance, the scene of the next important council, stands 
on the shore of that lovely lake that feeds the romantic Rhine. 
It has long sunk into decay. In the last century the grass was 
growing in its principal streets 5 i Its air of desolation and de- 
cline formed a striking contrast to the busy Swiss towns on 
the neighboring lakes, and it still slumbers under the fatal in- 
fluence of a Catholic rule. The only noted spots in Constance 
are a dark dungeon, a few feet square, in which John Huss 
was confined, the rude Gothic hall where he was tided, the min- 
ster where he was condemned, the place where he was burned, 
the swift -flowing river into which his ashes were cast, and 
which his persecutors hoped would bear away all that remain- 
ed of their illustrious victim into endless oblivion. Tain 
hope ! Warriors and princes, priests, abbots, monks, conspired 
to blot from existence a single faint and feeble being, a child 
of poverty and toil. They burned his books; they cast his 
ashes into the Rhine. And to-day all Bohemia assembles to 
do honor to the names of Huss and his disciple Jerome, and 
to cany into execution the principles of freedom and progress 
they advocated four centuries ago. 

The Council of Constance met in 1414. Three rival Popes 
were then contesting each other's claim to the papacy.Q Each 
Pope had his adherents, and for nearly forty years priests. 
rulers, and laity had lived in doubt as to the true successor of 
St. Peter. It was plain that there could not be three infalli- 
ble potentates on the same throne : yet each pretender assert- 
ed his claim with equal vigor. Gregory. Benedict, and John 

C 1 ) Midland, iii.. p. 441. 

( 2 ) Coxe. Travels in Switzerland. Letter iii. The dnngeon is eight feet 
long, six broad. 

( 3 ) Concilium Constantiensis. Labbe. xri.. p. 4 et seq. The Conncil of 
Pisa had attempted in vain to remove the schism. 1410. See Lenfant. Pise. 



176 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

launched anathemas against each other; and a generation 
lived and died uncertain whether it had not adored and obey- 
ed an heretical Pope.Q John XXIII., in the opinion of his 
age one of the most abandoned of men, was persuaded or en- 
trapped by the cardinals and the emperor into summoning a 
general council ; and Constance, on the borders of Switzerland 
and Germany, was selected as the place of meeting. The 
council met at a period of singular interest in history .( a ) Not 
only was the papacy divided between three Popes, but that 
strong and wide opposition to the papal and the monkish rule 
which seems to have existed in every age was now showing 
itself in unusual strength. England was half converted to the 
doctrines of Wycliffe ; Bohemia and its king shared the free 
opinions of Huss ; the new literature of Italy was skeptical 
or indifferent ; France and Germany were already shocked at 
the vices of the monks ; while industry and commerce were 
rapidly introducing ideas of human equality that must finally 
destroy the supremacy of the feudal lords. The warrior caste 
as well as the priestly was threatened by the religious reform- 
ers, and both united vigorously at the Council of Constance 
to crush the progress of re volution. ( 3 ) They strove to rebuild 
and reanimate the established Church, to intimidate the re- 
formers, and to destroy forever the rising hopes of the people. 
For the moment they succeeded. The Council of Con- 
stance was the most splendid gathering of priests and princes 
Europe had ever seen. The Emperor Sigismund attended its 
sittings, with all the German chiefs and prelates. The Pope, 
John XXIII., came, followed by a throng of Italian cardinals 
and bishops, hoping to control its proceedings. Almost every 
European sovereign was represented by an embassador. ( 4 ) 
The little city of Constance shone with the pomp of royal and 
noble retinues, with the red robes of cardinals, and the ermine 
and jewels of ecclesiastical princes ; riot and license filled its 

(*) Labbe, Con., xvi., p. 4. 

( 2 ) Lenfaiit, Histoire du Concile de Constance, Preface. 

( 3 ) Lenfant notices the influence of the laity on the council. 

( 4 ) Lenfant, Preface, p. 21. There were 150 bishops, 100 abbots, 30 car- 
dinals, 3 patriarchs. 






DEPOSITION OF A POPE. 177 

streets ; and the Council of Constance was noted for the cor- 
rupt morals of its members, and the shameless conduct of the 
prelates of the established Church. Its sittings began No- 
vember, 1414, and continued until April, 1418. Its proceed- 
ings were marked by a singular boldness. It deposed John 
XXIII. for his notorious vices and his alleged contumacy ; re- 
moved Gregory and Benedict ; and elected a new Pope, Mar- 
tin V., who was finally acknowledged by all Europe as the 
successor of St. Peter. It declared that the council was supe- 
rior to the Pope,( x ) and heard with attention the eloquent ser- 
mon of Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, in which 
he defended the privileges of a united Christendom against 
the claims of the Bishop of Rome. It provided that a general 
council should be summoned every five or seven years ; and it 
strove to limit the rapacity of Rome by relieving the clergy 
from its exactions. In order to prevent the undue influence 
of the Italians, the council divided all its members into four 
nations or classes ; each nation had a single vote, and a major- 
ity determined the result. These revolutionary movements 
have made the Council of Constance odious to the succeeding 
Popes. Its canons have been disregarded, its authority de- 
nied ; and no devout Roman Catholic would now venture to 
assert what was plainly the opinion of the Roman Church in 
the dawn of the fifteenth century, that the Pope is inferior to 
the council. 

Having ended the schism in the Papal Church, the Council 
of Constance next proceeded to crush heresy and reform. To 
the corrupt monks and priests of that barbarous age the chief 
of heretics was the pure and gentle Huss. , A child of pover- 
ty, educated among the people, John Huss had come, a poor 
scholar, to the famous University of Prague.( 2 ) His mother 
brought him from his native village to be matriculated, and 
on the road fell on her knees and recommended him to Heav- 
en. Maintained by charity, he studied with ardor ; his mind 



( J ) Lenfant, i., p. 22, Preface ; Labbe, Con., xvi., p. 8. Gregory and Ben- 
edict do not admit its claims. 
( 2 ) Lenfant, i., p. 24. 

12 



178 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

was fed with scholastic learning ; he became a preacher, vig- 
orous and original ; and in the Chapel of Bethlehem crowded 
congregations listened to the inspired lessons of the ardent 
priest. Huss had early formed a clear conception of a living 
Antichrist, a creature made up of blasphemy and hypocrisy, 
of corruption and crime ; and of a pure and lovely form, the 
Church of the early age.Q To the one he gave all his love 
and confidence, to the other an undying hate. The Antichrist 
was Rome. The vices and stupid ignorance of the monks, the 
shameless license of the clergy, the insolent pride of the bish- 
ops, the rivalry of the contending Popes, convinced the ardent 
reformer that the established Church had long ceased to be 
Christian. He inveighed in vigorous sermons and treatises 
against every form of corruption. He denounced the monks 
and the Popes, indulgences, Crusades, and a thousand enormi- 
ties. Jerome of Prague, who had lived at Oxford, brought 
him over the writings of Wycliff e, and the two friends studied 
and profited by the clear sense of the English reformer. 

At length the poor charity scholar became the most emi- 
nent man of his time. His native land acknowledged his 
merit, and all Bohemia adopted the opinions of its gifted son. 
The king and queen were his warm friends, and the nobility 
and the commons caught the ardor of reform.( 2 ) Huss was 
made rector of that great university, at that time the rival of 
those of Paris and Oxford, where he had won his education ; 
and Prague became the centre of a strong impulse toward 
progress that was felt in every part of Europe. The doctrines 
and the Bible of Wy cliff e were expounded at the only great 
seat of learning in Germany ; England and Bohemia, united 
by friendly ties, seemed about to throw off the papal rule; 
the vigor of Huss, the genius of Jerome, had nearly antici- 
pated the era of Luther. But it was too soon. The priestly 
caste and its ignorant instrument, the warrior caste, united to 
destroy the first elements of reformation, and the monks and 

C) See Huss, Opuscula, p. 14-23, where he paints the face and form of 
Antichrist, its mouth, neck, arms, tail. 
( 2 ) Lenfaut, i., p. 34. 



JOHN SUSS. 179 

bishops pursued Huss and his followers with their bitterest 
malignity. The Archbishop of Prague denounced him as a 
heretic, the Pope excommunicated him ; but Huss might still 
have escaped, supported by his sovereign, Wenceslaus, and the 
admiration of his countrymen, had he not been betrayed into 
the power of his foes. The Council of Constance met and 
summoned the reformer before its hostile tribunal. The chief 
vice of this infamous assembly was its shameless duplicity. 
The sentiment of honor, which we are sometimes told was the 
distinguishing mark of this age of chivalry, was plainly un- 
known to every one of the princes, knights, or priests who 
made up the splendid council. They deceived the Popes; 
they corrupted the feeble honesty of the Emperor Sigismund ; 
they openly adopted the rule that no faith was to be kept with 
heretics^ 1 ) they pledged the Koman Church to a system of 
perpetual falsehood and deceit. 

Huss was now in the full splendor of his renown. His 
name was illustrious throughout Europe, and his eminent tal- 
ents and spotless life had made him the pride and oracle of 
Bohemia. ( 3 ) He was nearly forty years of age. His appear- 
ance was line, his countenance mild and engaging. His prom- 
inent features, his clear and well-cut profile, have in them an 
Oriental air. He wore his hair and beard carefully trimmed, 
and dressed in neat scholastic attire. In the society of fair 
women, kings, and princes his manners had become polished, 
his carriage singularly attractive ; and his natural gentleness 
and piety threw around him an irresistible charm. As Rector 
of the University of Prague he held a position in the eyes of 
the world not inferior to that of many princes and nobles ; 
but in all his prosperity he had ever been noted for his humil- 
ity and his kindly grace. He lived above the world, and knew 
none of its inferior impulses. Yet had he not been able to 
avoid making many enemies. He had offended bitterly the 

(*) "Nee aliqua sibi fides aut promissio de jure naturali, divino, et hu- 
raano fuerit in prejudicium Catholicse fidei observanda." See Hallam, 
Mid. Ages, p. 398. 

( 2 ) The Jesuit editors, Labbe, Con., xvi., p. 4, insinuate simulatione sancti- 
tatis, etc. 



180 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

German students and professors at Prague, and they had with- 
drawn, in number about five thousand, to found the rival col- 
lege at Leipsic. He was the chief of the metaphysical faction 
of the Realists; the Germans and the French were chiefly 
Nominalists ; and in the fierce quarrels that raged between the 
two scholastic parties a hatred even to death often grew up be- 
tween the opposing chiefs. The rectors of the University of 
Paris (Gerson) and of Leipsic (John Hoffman) looked on their 
opponent at Prague as abominable and accursed; and the 
Nominalists afterward boasted that the death of Huss was due 
to them alone. So brutal was the age that men killed each 
other for some shadowy difference in metaphysics ! 

Gerson was the chief theologian of the time, the new found- 
er of the liberties of the Gallican Church. Yet he took part 
in all the frauds of the Council of Constance, saw his illustri- 
ous fellow-rector pine in a horrible dungeon and die at the 
stake, and aided in his destruction. The Rector of the Uni- 
versity of Leipsic also shared in the worst acts of the council. 
The crimes of nobles and priests were instigated by the most 
eminent Catholic scholars, and the principles of elevated 
churchmen were no more humane than had been those of 
their Gothic ancestors, or the barbarians of a Feejee island. 
To such men the mild purity of Huss and Jerome was a per- 
petual reproach. They could not endure their existence upon 
the same earth. They strove to extirpate them forever, and 
cast their ashes into the rapid Rhine. 

Fearless of their enmity, and strong in his consciousness of 
innocence, sustained by the friendship of his king and his 
country, and, above all, provided with a safe-conduct from the 
Emperor Sigismund, Huss set out from Prague in October to 
obey the summons of the council. Q As he passed through 
Germany he was met and welcomed by immense throngs of 
the people. He was received everywhere as the champion of 
human rights. Men came to gaze on him as on a benefactor. 
Even the German ecclesiastics, it is said, saluted respectfully 
the arch -heretic. He passed safely through Nuremberg, at- 

(*) Lenfant, Constance, i., p. 39. 



HUSS AT CONSTANCE. 181 

tended by a guard of honor, and entered Constance almost in 
triumph. Q He evidently feared no danger. He even im- 
prudently defended the doctrines of Wyclrffe in the midst of 
angry monks and priests, and courted their malignity. The 
Pope, however, John XXIII., had sworn to protect him, the 
Emperor Sigismund was bound for his safety, and all Bohe- 
mia watched over the life of Huss. But the rule had been 
adopted that no faith was to be kept with heretics. Within a 
few days after his arrival Huss was seized, cast into the hor- 
rible dungeon of the Dominican convent, and fastened by a 
chain to the floor. ( 2 ) 

He was now in the toils of Antichrist, and was to feel all 
the extreme malice of the fearful being he had so often im- 
agined or described. Its falsehood, its baseness, its savage 
and unsparing cruelty, he was now to realize, if never be- 
fore. The Emperor Sigismund came to Constance soon after 
Huss's imprisonment, and remonstrated feebly against the vio- 
lation of his safe-conduct ; but the chiefs of the council soon 
convinced him that the Church would spare no heretic, and 
Huss was left to languish in his dungeon. ( 3 ) Articles of ac- 
cusation were drawn up against him; false witnesses were 
brought to convict him of crimes he had never committed; 
he was persecuted with incessant questions; and for more 
than six months the great orator and scholar pined in a dread- 
ful confinement. At length, on the 6th of July, 1415, he was 
dragged from his dungeon and led out to condemnation and 
death. 

The council assembled in that sombre and massive minster 
whose gloomy pile still frowns over the silent streets of Con- 
stance.Q The Emperor Sigismund presided, surrounded by 
his temporal and spiritual peers. A throng of cardinals, bish- 
ops, and priests assembled to take part in the proceedings, and 
to exult over the doom of one whose holy life seemed a per- 
petual reproach to their notorious profligacy and corruption. 

O Lenfant, L, pp. 39, 40. 

( 2 ) Id., i., p. 60 ; Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, Let. 

( 3 ) Lenfant, i., p. 76. ( 4 ) Id., i., p. 401. 



182 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

The church was filled in every part with eager spectators. It 
had been carefully arranged for that singular ceremonial with 
which the holy fathers intended to degrade their victim from 
his priesthood before they delivered him over to the secular 
power. In the midst rose a platform, on which were placed 
the robes and ornaments of a priest, and where Huss was to 
be robed and disrobed in presence of all the people. A sol- 
emn mass was performed, and while emperor and priest bowed 
in adoration, their victim was kept waiting at the door under 
a guard of soldiers, lest his presence might desecrate the sacred 
rite.Q He was then led in, pale, faint, and worn with a terri- 
ble imprisonment, and ascended the platform. Here he knelt 
in audible prayer, while the Bishop of Lodi delivered a ser^ 
mon on the enormity of heresy ; and as the prelate finished 
his vindictive denunciation, he pointed to the feeble victim ; 
he turned to the powerful emperor and cried out, " Destroy 
this obstinate heretic !" 

A perfect silence reigned throughout the immense assem- 
bly. Various proceedings followed. The charges against 
Huss were read, but he was scarcely permitted to reply to 
them. He listened on his knees, his hands raised to heaven. 
Once he mentioned aloud his safe-conduct that had been so 
shamefully violated, and turned his sad eyes upon the em- 
peror. A deep blush spread over Sigismund's face ; he was 
strongly moved. It is said that long after, when, at the Diet 
of Worms, Charles V. was urged to violate Luther's safe-con- 
duct, he replied, " I do not wish to blush like my predecessor 
Sigismund." Yet the anecdote can hardly be authentic, for 
Charles was never known to blush for any one of his dishon- 
orable deeds. Sentence of degradation was next pronounced 
against Huss. The priests appointed for that duty at once ap- 
proached him, put on him the priestly robes, and then took 
them off. They then placed on his head a paper crown, on 
which were painted three demons of frightful aspect, and on 
it was inscribed, " Chief of the Heretics." Huss said to them, 
" It is less painful than a crown of thorns." They mocked 

(*) Leiifant, i., p. 401. 



EXECUTION OF BUSS. 183 

him with bitter raillery, and then led him away to execu- 
tion.Q 

He went from the chnrch to the place of execution guard- 
ed by the officers of justice. Behind him came, in a long 
procession, the emperor, the prince palatine, their courtiers, 
and eight hundred soldiers. A vast throng of people follow- 
ed, who would not be turned back. As Huss passed the epis- 
copal palace he saw that they were already burning his books, 
and smiled at the malice of his enemies. He was bound to 
the stake, and the wood piled up around him. Before the 
pile was lighted the elector palatine advanced and asked him 
to recant and save his life. He refused. He prayed, and all 
the multitude prayed with him. The fire was lighted; he 
raised his arms and eyes toward heaven, and as the flames 
ascended he was heard joyfully singing a hymn of praise. 
Higher, higher rose his dying chant, until his voice mingled 
with the songs of angels above. ( 2 ) 

The ashes of John Huss, his clothes, and even his simple 
furniture, were cast into the Rhine, lest his followers, might 
preserve them as relics of the martyr. But the Bohemians 
afterward gathered the earth on which he suffered, and carried 
it away. His friend, Jerome of Prague, was burned the next 
year, by order of the Council of Constance. A scholar, a man 
of classic refinement and feeling, the learned Poggio, heard 
his eloquent defense before the council, witnessed his happy 
martyrdom, and declared that Jerome had revived in his gen- 
ius and his philosophy the highest excellence of Greece and 
Pome: the modern pagan did not perceive how he had sur- 
passed it. Bohemia has never ceased to lament and honor 
her gifted sons, and the world is just becoming deeply con- 
scious of what it owes to Huss and Jerome of Prague, the 
forerunners of Luther. 

In July, 1431, a council assembled at Basle still more revo- 
lutionary in its character than that of Constance. ( 3 ) The Pope, 



( x ) Lenfant, i., p. 408. 

( 2 ) Id., i., p. 415 : " His voice sounded cheerfully above the flames." 

( 3 ) Id., Council of Basle ; Mosheim, ii., p. 502. 



184: ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

Engenius IV., attempted to dissolve the council ; the council 
deposed the Pope, and elected another in his place. A long 
controversy followed, and a new schism in the Roman Church. 
Eugenius summoned a council of his own adherents, and thus 
two popes and two councils contended for the supremacy of 
the Christian world. But the quarrel was terminated by the 
triumph of the papal faction. At the Council of Basle was 
planned a temporary union between the Latin and the Greek 
churches, which soon ended in their complete separation. The 
bold effort of this great council to control the papacy wholly 
failed, and from its dissolution Rome gained new strength. 
Each succeeding Pope enlarged his authority, defied public 
opinion, opposed every effort to reform the Church, and threw 
the shield of his infallibility over the vices and disorders of 
the clergy. The monks again ruled mankind. The Domini- 
cans invented the Spanish Inquisition, and persecuted heretics 
with subtle malice. Convents and nunneries became centres 
of corruption, and the favorite subject of the satires of Chau- 
cer, of Rabelais, of Erasmus, or of Luther is the degraded and 
dissolute monk. 

At length the Reformation came. The conscience of man- 
kind, which had been apparently forever suppressed with the 
martyrdom of Huss and Jerome, found a new expression in 
the commanding genius of Luther, and the intellect of Eu- 
rope awoke at his powerful summons. Q He dissolved the 
spell of monkish delusion and tyranny. He consolidated into 
a powerful party that wide but disunited opposition which 
almost from the age of Constantine had looked with horror 
and shame upon the pride and corruption of the established 
Church. The pure and the good of every land — the spiritual 
descendants of the Cathari, the Albigenses, the Yaudois, or 
the Wycliffites; the humble and gentle Christians of Bohe- 
mia, France, and even of Italy and Spain — now ventured to 
unite in a generous hope that the reign of Antichrist was 

C) Pallavicino (Bibliotlieca Classica Sacra, Roma, 1847, Istoria, etc.) 
thinks the Hussites and the Waldenses blots on the fair face of the Church 
that should long ago have been extirpated, i., p. 79. 



REFORMATION. 185 

over.Q Tradition and false miracles, the indulgences, the 
worship of images and saints, the idolatry of the mass, the 
horrors of the monastic system, seemed about to pass swiftly 
away before the voice of reason and of conscience ; the pure 
faith and practice of the Gospel seemed ready to descend again 
on man. In the year 1540 a general and peaceable reformation 
of the whole Christian world was possible. Already Spain 
itself was tilled with Protestants, Italy was sighing for a 
purer faith, the Scriptures were studied, and reform demand- 
ed in Eome and Naples. ( 2 ) France was eager for religious 
progress; the vigorous North was already purified and set 
free ; and had some wise and gentle spirit controlled the pa- 
pal councils, some pure Erasmus or a generous Pole, and from 
the Eoman throne breathed peace and good-will to man, an 
age of unprecedented progress might have opened upon the 
world. The warrior caste which had so long preyed upon the 
people would have sunk into decay. The priestly caste would 
have lost its vices and its pride. The industrial classes, which 
in Spain, France, Italy, Germany, formed the chief part of the 
reformers, might have risen to control the State, and Europe 
would have been free. 

The next, the last great papal council — the most mischiev- 
ous of them all — came to destroy the rising hopes of man- 
kind. It breathed war, not peace. It spread irreconcilable 
enmity among nations. It leagued the warriors and the 
priests in a deadly assault upon the working-man. It declared 
war against the factory and the workshop, the printing-press 
and the school. It crushed the industry of Italy and Spain ; 
it banished the frugal and thoughtful Huguenots from France ; 
it strove in vain to make Holland a desolate waste, and to 
blight in its serpent folds the rising intellect of England ; it 
aimed vain blows at the genius of Germany and the North ; 
it held in bondage for three miserable centuries the mind of 



O Pallavicino, i., p. 99 : " Sequaci di Giovanni Huss condannato," etc. 

( 2 ) Among the noted Italian reformers were Peter Martyr, Bishop Ver- 
gerio and his brother, his friend Spira. See Middle ton, Evan. Biog., i. ; 
p. 510 ; Sarpi, i., p. 101 et seq. ; Ranke, Hist. Popes, i. ; p. 70 et seq. 



186 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

the decaying South. To the Council of Trent,( x ) by an easy- 
deduction, may be traced the great war which Charles Y. 
waged against his German subjects, and the disastrous cru- 
sades of his son Philip against the Netherlands and Queen 
Elizabeth ; the wild rancor of the League and the Guises ; the 
persecutions, worse than those of Diocletian, of Louis XIY. ; 
the Thirty Years' War, in which Wallenstein and Tilly made 
half Germany a blood-stained wilderness ; the fatal bigotry of 
Austria ; the tyranny of Spain. It was a flame of discord, a 
harbinger of strife; and to the student of history no specta- 
cle is more startling than that torrent of woe which descended 
upon mankind from the deliberations and the anathemas of a 
scanty gathering of bishops and Jesuits in the rocky heights 
of the Tyrol. 

In 1542 the moment of hope had passed. The Pope, Paul 
III., decreed death to the heretic and the reformer. Loyola 
and the Jesuits ruled at Rome, and the doctrine of passive 
obedience became the single principle of the papal faith. 
The Inquisition was rapidly exterminating every trace of op- 
position to the hierarchy in Italy ; a dead and dull submission 
reigned in Yenice or in Rome; and the papal missionaries, 
exulting in their success at home, trusted soon to carry the 
effective teaching of the Holy Office into the rebellious cities 
of Germany and the North. With what joy would they see 
Luther and Melanchthon chained to the stake, like Huss and 
Jerome ! How proudly should the papal legions sweep over 
the land of Zwingli and the home of Calvin ! With such 
fond anticipations, a league for the extirpation of heresy was 
formed between the Pope, Paul III., and the Emperor, Charles 
Y. The decrees of the Council of Trent were to be enforced 
by the arms of the two contracting parties ; the Protestants 
of Germany were to be the earliest victims of the alliance ; 
and all who had apostatized from the ancient faith were to be 
compelled to return to the bosom of the Holy See.( 2 ) The 

(*) Concils von Trient Canones und Beschliisse, von D. Wilhelm Smets, 
an authorized edition, gives all the proceedings ; Sarpi and Pallavicino 
the history. 

( 2 ) Robertson, Charles V., book viii. 



COUNCIL OF TRENT. 187 

meaning of this famous compact between the Bishop of Rome 
and the emperor can not be misunderstood. It was a project 
to crush freedom of thought and religious progress by wars 
and massacre, the rack and the stake ; an effort to make the 
papal Inquisition universal. 

If, as has been done by some modern historians and most 
of the Romish writers who have described the Council of Trent 
to the present age, we could separate it wholly from the his- 
tory of its period, and look upon it merely as the gathering of 
a few bishops of more or less learning and piety anxious only 
to fix the faith of their Church and to define the form of their 
belief ,Q we might excuse its rash judgments, its imprudent 
conservatism, and the intolerance of its countless anathemas ; 
we might submit with a smile to hear the doctrines of Luther 
and the Bible pronounced forever accursed, and to be com- 
manded to pay a deep reverence to images under the penalty 
of excommunication^ 2 ) we might pardon the critical blind- 
ness, if not the want of taste, that placed the -Book of Tobit 
on a level with the Gospel of St. John ;( 3 ) we might remem- 
ber only as examples of monkish superstition in the sixteenth 
century the attempt to chain the press,( 4 ) to promote the sale 
of indulgences,( 5 ) the strange theory of the mass, the feeble 
reasoning on the sacraments ; and we could admit that, under 
the irresistible influence of that impulse toward reform begun 
by the anathematized heretics, the council strove honestly to 
correct some of the errors of the Romish Church. But, unhap- 
pily for mankind, the Council of Trent had a far less innocent 
purpose. Its chief promoters were men who had already re- 
solved on the destruction of its opponents. Every member 
of the synod knew that the principles it laid down, the prac- 
tices it enjoined, were rejected and condemned by a large part 

(*) Hallam, Lit. Europe, ii. p. 361, n., treats it merely as an intellectual 
agent. He does not allude to its results. 

( 2 ) " Et nunc etiam damnat ecclesia," Sessio xxv., De Yeneratioue Sanc- 
torum, etc. 

( 3 ) Sessio iv., De Canonicis Scripturis. 

( 4 ) De Libris Prohibitis, Reg. ii., p. 3 et seq. 
C) Sessio xxv., Decretum de Iudulgentibus. 



188 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

of the Christian world; that they could only be enforced by 
fire and the sword ; that they were about to be the occasion 
of a bitter war between the reformers and the papal faction ; 
that every anathema uttered by the council would be written 
in letters of blood upon every Protestant land. Yet its mem- 
bers proceeded calmly with their labors. They rejected every 
plan of compromise, every sentiment of mercy. They refused 
to listen to the tolerant suggestions of the Gallican Church. 
They obeyed every intimation of the Pope and the Jesuits ; 
and they were plainly prepared to bind to the stake not some 
eloquent Jerome or spotless Huss alone, but whole nations 
and generations of reformers. 

At Trent among the snow -clad hills of the Tyrol, on the 
banks of the rapid Athesis, the papal legates and a few bish- 
ops assembled in December, 1545, and Cardinal Del Monte, 
afterward Pope Julius III., presided at its first session. A 
second was held in January, when only forty-three members 
attended. At the third, February 4th, 1546, the Nicene Creed 
was recited with its modern additions. But with the fourth 
session, April 18th, 1546, the business of the council began by 
an authoritative determination of the foundations of the Ro- 
man faith ; and it was decided, in a scanty assembly of forty- 
eight Italian, German, and Spanish bishops, a few cardinals, 
and the papal legates, that the Scriptures and tradition, the 
Old Testament with the apocryphal books, the New Testa- 
ment, and the opinions of the fathers, were the equal and the 
only sources of religious knowledge. (*) But it was carefully 
enjoined, at the same time, under severe penalties, that none 
but the Church should define the meaning of the sacred writ- 
ings. All private judgment was forbidden ; and whoever 
ventured to think for himself was to be punished by the legal 
authorities. ( 2 ) Upon this broad but unstable foundation the 
council now proceeded to erect that religious system which 
for three centuries has ruled at Rome. The Pope was su- 

O Sessio iv., Decretum de Canouicis Scripturis. 

( 2 ) " Qui contraveuerint — pceiiis a jure statutis puniantur." See Palla- 
vicmo, iii., p. 261-272. 



TEE JESUITS AT TRENT, 189 

preme at Trent through his acute agents ; and however vigor- 
ous the opposition might appear, every decision of the assem- 
bly was prepared at Home, and was carried through the coun- 
cil by the controlling influence of the legates, the Jesuits, and 
the Italian bishops. It was Paul III., Loyola, and Caraffa who 
spoke in the name of the Church. 

The sessions continued until April, 1547, when, on the pre- 
text that an epidemic disease was prevailing in Trent, the Pope 
issued a bull transferring the council to Bologna, within his 
own territories, where it would be more perfectly under his 
control. The legates and the papal party obeyed the man- 
date, but Charles Y. ordered his German bishops to remain 
at Trent. The schism continued until Paul died, when his 
successor, Julius III., once more convened the assembly at 
Trent.Q It remained in session until April, 1552, when the 
success of Protestant arms in Germany and the brilliant ex- 
ploits of the Elector Maurice drove the bishops in alarm from 
their dangerous locality. ( 2 ) The council was prorogued or diss 
solved ; and for ten years the doctrines of the Papal Church 
remained hidden undefined in the bosom of Kome. They 
were years filled with remarkable events. The order of the 
Jesuits became a great power in Europe, and its acute and un- 
scrupulous members had instilled into the minds of princes 
and priests the doctrine of passive obedience to Rome, and of 
relentless war against heresy. Loyola guided the policy of 
the Papal Church. In France a war broke out between the 
Huguenots and their oppressors, of which the result was not 
to be determined for many years, but which finally united the 
French bishops in hostility to reform. A great triumph was 
achieved by the papal party in England, that was followed by 
a signal overthrow. Mary succeeded to the English throne, and 
as the wife of Philip II. gave back her realm, filled with the 
blood of the martyrs, to the Papal See. But, in 1558, Mary 
died childless; and Elizabeth, the representative of a Protestant 
nation, defied the anathemas of the Pope. Philip II. was now 



C) See Bulla Resumptions — Julio III., Smets. 
( 2 ) Sessio xvi.j Decretum Suspensions, etc. 



190 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

enforcing the decrees of the earlier Council of Trent upon the 
unhappy Netherlands, and the Prince of Orange was about to 
found a new nation. Of the early reformers few survived. 
Luther and Melanchthon slept side by side in the castle church 
at Wittenberg. Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, apparently less 
fortunate, had died like Huss and Jerome. The aged Calvin 
and his faithful Beza still ruled and studied at Geneva — the 
last of that brilliant company who had formed the day-stars 
of the Reformation. 

Pius IV., in January, 1562, enforced the re-assembling of 
the council at Trent. Loyola was dead, and the fierce Lainez 
ruled over the Jesuits. A new race of bishops filled the coun- 
cil. Its numbers enlarged ; its intellectual character was re- 
spectable ; but no brilliant Athanasius, no eloquent Gregory, 
appeared in the ranks of the papal prelates. It sat for near- 
ly two years, and often its fierce debates and angry tumults 
revived the memories of Ephesus and Mce.Q The French 
faction, the Spanish, and the papal contended with a violence 
that seemed at times to threaten the dissolution of the coun- 
cil and an irreparable schism in the disordered Church. The 
Spaniards defended with vigor the divine origin of the bish- 
ops against the claims of the papacy ; the French suggested 
the superiority of the council to the Pope, demanded the cup 
for the laity, and even advocated the marriage of the clergy. 
A French embassador, Du Ferier, the Gregory of Trent, de- 
nounced with sharp satire the feeble superstition of the coun- 
cil, and declared it to be the author of the miseries of France ;( 2 ) 
the corrupt and politic Cardinal Lorraine, at the head of the 
French delegation, in tumid speeches defended the Gallican 
policy. Yet the papal party, led by the Jesuits, the haughty 
Lainez and the busy Salmeron, and sustained by the superior 
numbers of the Italian bishops, succeeded in nearly all their 
objects.( 3 ) They threw aside with contempt the whole Galli- 

( x ) Torellus, in Le Plat, vii., p. 205, gives an account of a fray between 
the Spaniards and Italians ; they were then forbidden to carry arms. 

( 2 ) Pallavicino notices with asperity the vigor of Ferier, xi., p. 17; xii., 
p. 20-23. Sarpi, viii., pp. 54, 55. 

( 3 ) See Bungener, Council of Trent, trans. A useful narrative, p. 455. 



LAINEZ AT TRENT. 191 

can policy ; they taught perfect submission to the papal rule. 
Lainez, in the midst of an excited assembly, declared that all 
who opposed the supremacy of the Pope in all things were 
Protestants in principle, and, with haughty looks, almost de- 
nounced his adversaries as heretics. The contest raged for a 
time with fierce bitterness, and often the streets of Trent were 
filled with riot and bloodshed from the encounters of the re- 
tainers of the different factions. But at length the corrupt 
Cardinal Lorraine, a true Guise, went over to the papal side ; 
the Spanish faction sunk into silence ; and, one by one, the 
most extravagant dogmas of the mediseval Church were incor- 
porated into the creed of the Romish clergy. Q From the 
heights of Tyrol the fierce Jesuits and monks threw clown 
their gage of defiance and of hate to the whole Protestant 
world, and to every project of reform. They offered to the 
heretic submission to the Pope or death. 

Kothing was thought of but traditional observances ; the 
usages of Pome were preferred to the plain teachings of the 
Scriptures. Images were declared sacred, when the whole 
Jewish and Christian theology had denounced their use — had 
commanded the sou! to seek a direct and spiritual union with 
its God. The gentle lessons of the Sermon on the Mount 
were transformed into an endless series of anathemas that 
were full of bitter malevolence. The sacred feast of the dis- 
ciples was converted into a pompous idolatry. 2 For the apos- 
tles the council showed still less respect than for the lessons 
of their Master. Instead of the industry, temperance, and 
frugality inculcated by St. Paul, it advocated monkish indo- 
lence and priestly intolerance. It condemned the marriages 
of the clergy, when St. Peter himself, the fancied founder of 
the Pom an Church, had been a faithful husband, and in his 
missionary toils had been accompanied by his martyr wife ;( 3 ) 
when St. Paul had instructed his pastors or presbyters to be 
prudent husbands and fathers, and strict in the education of 

(*) Bungener, p. 627. ( 2 ) Sessio xxii., De Sacrificio Missae. 

( 3 ) 1 Corinth., ix., 5. We might infer that all the apostles had mar- 
ried ; Peter's wife was martyred. Clemens Alex., De Monog., p. 8. 



192 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

their children ; when even at the Council of Nice the monk- 
ish observance had been rejected at the request of an ascetic. 
The invocation of Mary and the saints, the worship of relics, 
transubstantiation and interfusion,^) the use of pompous robes 
and a pagan ritual, confession, indulgences, and endless mod- 
ern observances, were enforced by dreadful anathemas, and he 
who ventured even to hesitate as to their propriety was aban- 
doned to the care of the Holy Office. The use of the Script- 
ures by the laity was in effect forbidden ; the prohibition was 
made total by succeeding popes ; and the instruction of the 
apostle to the believer to search and try the grounds of his 
faith was treated with contempt by his pretended successors. 
Conscience and freedom of thought were to be wholly sup- 
pressed. On the question of the superiority of the Pope to 
the council, after long and violent debates, no open decision 
was made ; but the matter was, in fact, determined by the refer- 
ence of all the proceedings of the assembly to the revisal of the 
Pope. As the infallible head of the Church, he was empowered 
to reject or confirm every canon of the Council of Trent. ( 2 ) 

Winters and summers had passed over the Roman bishops 
for nearly eight yearsQ in their mountain fastness, as they 
groped amidst the endless controversies of the fathers and 
studied the acts of Chalcedon and Nice. We admit at least 
their perseverance and their weary toil. Trent and its en- 
virons do not seem to have been always an agreeable resi- 
dence. In autumn the hot sun beat upon the narrow valley. 
In winter a deluge of snow or rain often poured down upon 
the little city, overflowed the rapid Athesis, and swept through 
the watery streets.Q Disease was often prevalent,( 5 ) and sev- 
eral eminent delegates died, and were buried with pompous 
funerals. The people of the mountains were rude, and not 

(') Sessio xvii., cap. xi. For anathemas see Sessio xxi., Can. i., ii. ; Ses- 
sio xiii., Can. iii. ( 2 ) Sessio xxv., De Fine, etc. 

( 3 ) The council sat nearly eighteen years, but of these ten are included 
in a prorogation, besides the schism at Bologna. 

( 4 ) Torellus, in Le Plat. 

( 5 ) An influenza sometimes determined the fate of a proposition for re- 
form. See Sarpi, lib. vii. 



THE COUNCIL CLOSES. 193 

always respectful ; the women were not attractive, and suf- 
fered from the goitre ;(*) while the wits of the Holy City, as 
of the Protestant countries, followed the council with sharp 
satires, and declared that its inspiration was brought in a car- 
pet-bag from Rome. Elizabeth called it a popish conventicle. 
The keen and ready Protestant controversialists denounced it 
as a band of persecutors. The Pope was enraged at its tur- 
bulent discord; and all Europe longed for its dissolution. 
Meantime, far below, surged on the wave of Reformation, 
and Germany, France, and the Netherlands resounded with 
the psalms of Marot and Beza ; and the menacing voice of the 
enraged people often reached the ears of the drowsy prelates 
at Trent. The hardy Xorth threw off the monkish rule, de- 
faced its images, broke up the monasteries, and breathed only 
defiance to the cruel bigotry of the council. Mary of Scot- 
land, in a piteous letter to the legates, lamented that her Cal- 
vinistic subjects would not suffer her to send bishops to the 
assembly of Antichrist. ( 2 ) Germany had secured freedom of 
thought by the valor of Maurice and the treaty of Passau. 
Geneva, with its twenty-five thousand impoverished citizens, 
shone a beacon of light among its Swiss mountains, and de- 
fied alike the hatred and the covetousness of France, Savoy, 
and the Pope. The Huguenots were fighting in France for 
toleration, and the council sung a joyous Te Deum over the 
ineffectual defeat of the Prince of Conde. It was time for 
the bishops to separate. 

The proceedings were hurried to an end. Important mat- 
ters of faith, affecting the destiny of immortal souls, were de- 
termined with imprudent haste. "What could not be decided 
was referred to the Pope. A bishop of Xazianzum, whose 
dullness formed a bold contrast to the wit and pathos of the 
sainted Gregory, preached a farewell discourse in which he 
called upon mankind to adore the wisdom, the clemency, the 
Christian tolerance, of the Council of Trent.( 3 ) A parting 

O Torellus, Le Plat, vii., p. 159-161. ( 2 ) Le Plat, vii., p. 217. 

( 3 ) i: Audite hsec, omnes gentes, auribus percipite, oranes qui habitatis 
orbem." Suiets, Concils von Trient, p. 201. 

13 



194 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

antiphonal was sung; the Cardinal of Lorraine, the corrupt 
and ambitious Guise, intoned the praises of the cruel Charles 
V., the immoral Julius, the bigoted Pius, and all the holy 
council, and pronounced them ever blessed. The bishops 
and cardinals responded with a loud concurrence. Once more 
the voice of Guise rang over the assembly, Anathema cunc- 
tis hcereticis ! And all the bishops and cardinals poured 
forth an eager and malevolent response, Anathema, anathe- 
ma!^) Meanwhile, in many a humble cottage in the neigh- 
boring valleys of Piedmont, the gentle Yaudois, the children 
of the early church, were singing Christian hymns to the good 
Saviour, and, accustomed to persecution, prayed for freedom 
to worship God. Scarcely did they hear the curse invoked 
upon them from the heights of Trent. Yet it was to ripen 
into long years of untold suffering. The poor and humble 
were to be torn in pieces, tossed from their native crags into 
dark ravines, cut with sharp knives, burned in raging fires by 
the mighty and the proud; and Milton, in a fierce poetic 
frenzy, was to cry aloud to Heaven : 

"Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughtered saints, whose bones 
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold." 

Such was the Council of Trent; and history would be un- 
faithful to its sacred trust — the cause of truth and of human 
progress — did it not point with unerring accuracy to the 
countless woes that have fallen upon man from the dull big- 
otry of the papal bishops. They met at a moment when the 
European intellect was strongly excited by a new impulse to- 
ward the good and the true ; when men longed for a holier 
life, a purer faith than had been the possession of their fathers. 
They gave them, instead, war and bitter strife, the doctrine of 
persecution, the visions of the Middle Ages. It is sometimes 
said that a reaction in favor of the Eoman Church followed 
upon the Council of Trent, and that the reformers were driven 
back from their Southern conquests to their strongholds in 
the North. They lost, indeed, Bohemia and the South of Ger- 

OSmets,p. 200. 



THE DECREES OF TRENT. 195 

many, the Netherlands and France. But neither of these 
triumphs of the council was an intellectual one ; its doctrines 
were nowhere accepted unless enforced by powerful armies 
and the slow prevalence of the Holy Office. The followers 
of Huss were extirpated in Bohemia; the Yaudois were 
slaughtered on their mountains ; Philip II. revived the medise- 
val Church on the ruins of Antwerp and Ghent ; the decrees 
of the Council of Trent were only triumphant in France 
when Louis XIV. destroyed Port Koyal, and banished, with 
terrible persecutions, the gifted Huguenots. 

For a brief period England was ruled by the earlier decis- 
ions of the famous council, and Mary enforced the faith in 
tradition by the fires of Smithfield. But not even the specta- 
cle of Latimer, Ridley, or Hooper perishing at the stake could 
convert a nation that preferred the teachings of the Scriptures 
to those of the fathers of Trent. England shook off the yoke 
of the schismatic council with fierce abhorrence. Her vigor- 
ous intellect refused to submit to a monkish rule ; and soon a 
Shakspeare, a Bacon, a Milton, and a Johnson proved that no 
mediaeval foe to genius enslaved the fortunate land. Through- 
out all Northern Germany the free school met and baffled the 
theory of persecution. Colleges and universities succeeded 
to the monastery and the cathedral, and the land of Luther 
repelled the dogmas of the Council of Trent. The Latin 
races were less fortunate. For three centuries Italy and 
Spain have slumbered under the monkish rule. Every anath- 
ema of the unsparing council has been enforced upon their 
unhappy people ; the Press has been silenced, the intellect de- 
praved ; industry has nearly died out. The Inquisition linger- 
ed long after it had been partially suppressed in other lands ;Q 
and swarms of monks and friars encouraged indolence and 
sapped the purity of nations. But within a few years even 
Italy and Spain have revolted against the decrees of the 
Tridentine Council. The people of the two most Catholic 



( x ) The Spanish Inquisition burned a poor woman for sorcery as late as 
1780. See Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, i., ch. iii. In 1680, an auto-da- 
fe" was looked upon as a glorious spectacle — a festal scene for the faithfuL, 



196 ECUMENICAL COUNCILS. 

lands have destroyed the monastic system, established freedom 
of thought, of religion, and of the Press, and have plainly 
made themselves liable to the severest anathemas chanted in 
the Cathedral of Trent. 

But while the people in every land have thus rebelled 
against monkish tyranny, the priests and the Pope, the only 
legal representatives of the Eomish Church, have proclaimed 
their unchangeable adhesion to the decrees of their last great 
council. To them the free school and the free press are as 
odious as they were to Lainez and Del Monte. To them the 
monastery is as dear as it was to Gregory and Jerome. They 
still heap anathemas upon the married clergy ; they refuse the 
cup to the laity ; they bow to the graven image. Of the duty 
of persecution for opinion's sake, they speak as openly as in 
the days of Loyola ; and they modestly suggest, with their his- 
torian, Pallavicino, that had the doctrine been more vigorously 
applied to Luther and Calvin, as well as to Jerome and Huss, 
the mediaeval Church would yet have reigned triumphant in 
every land.Q They still assert the supreme authority of the 
Holy See, the boundless infallibility of the Pope. But, in re- 
ply to their extravagant assumptions, the surging waves of 
Reformation have swept over Europe, and at length the de- 
crees of the Council of Trent are only received, in their full 
enormity, within the walls of the city of Rome. There until 
1870 a shadow of the Inquisition was still maintained ; there 
the press and the school were jealously watched ; there no he- 
retical assembly was permitted ; there monks and monasteries 
abounded ; there the true Roman and patriot was shot down 
with the Chassepot rifle ; and the Supreme Pontiff, enthroned 
over an enraged and rebellious people, there summoned his 
priestly legions to a final council of the Papal Church. 

We have thus imperfectly reviewed the story of the various 
councils. We might scarcely admit, with the saintly Gregory 



( l ) Pallavicino, i., p. 79, describes the opponents of the Roman Church as 
" picciol gregge cl'uomini rnstici e idiotici che eran reliquie o degli antichi 
Waldesi," etc. He could not coneeive of a Christian unless great and pow- 
erful. 



THE FIRST COUNCIL. 197 

Nazianzen, that no good result can ever flow from an assem- 
bly of bishops. Nicsea taught a lesson of comparative moder- 
ation. The genius and the honesty of the two Gregories re- 
lieved the dullness of the synod of Constantinople. Ephesus 
has become notorious for the vigorous orthodoxy of Cyril. 
Chalcedon was moderate and independent. Yet it is worthy 
of notice that the purest as well as the wisest of the sacred 
synods was the first ; that its members, chastened in poverty 
and persecution, still retained something of the apostolic dig- 
nity and grace ; and that the Christian world, still free and 
self-respecting, had not yet been forced to look with disap- 
pointment and shame upon the ambition and the vain preten- 
sions of its spiritual chiefs. 



THE VAUDOIS. 

Theee valleys of singular interest open from the higher 
Alps into the rich plains of Piedmont below. Through each 
a rapid stream or mountain torrent, fed by perpetual snows 
and glaciers, rushes with a varying current, and mingles at 
length with the stately Po.Q Two of the vales, Lucerna and 
Perouse, widen as they descend from the crags above, and 
melt into the general softness of the Italian scene. Lucerna, 
the most fertile, the most beautiful, possesses unrivaled charms. 
Its thick and almost perpetual foliage, its groves of mulberry- 
trees, its woods of chestnut, the waving fields of wheat, its 
vineyards climbing up the mountain-side, its temperate air, its 
countless hamlets, its innocent and happy people, seem to rest 
in perfect peace beneath the shelter of the encircling Alps. 
It would indeed be a paradise, exclaimed the historian Leger, 
if it were not so near the Jesuits at Turin.( 2 ) San Martino, 
the third valley, is happily less beautiful.( 3 ) It is a wild ra- 
vine pierced by a fierce mountain torrent — the Germanasca. 
On each side of the stream the huge Alps shoot upward, and 
ranges of inaccessible cliffs and crags frown over the narrow 
vale beneath. Its climate is severe, its people hardy. In the 
upper part of the valley winter is almost perpetual. The 
snow lies for eight or nine months on the ground. The crops 
are scanty, the herbage faint and rare. The shrill cry of the 
marmot, the shriek of the eagle, alone disturb the silence of 
the Yaudois Sabbath ; and in the clear, bright air the graceful 

( J ) Leger, L'Histoire G6nerale des Eglises Vaudoises, p. 2. Vaudois and 
Waldenses are words of the same meaning. They are defined, "the peo- 
ple of the valleys." 

( 2 ) Leger, p. 3. See Muston, Histoire des Yaudois ; or Israel of the Alps, 
i., p. 7. 

( 3 ) Leger, p. 7 ; Muston, p. 19, Israel of the Alps. 



SAN MABTINO. 199 

chamois is seen leaping from peak to peak of his mountain 
pastures. 

San Martino has formed for ages the citadel of the Yaudois, 
the last refuge of religious freedom. Often, when the papal 
troops had swept over its sister valleys, filling their fairer 
scenery with bloodshed and desolation, the brave people of the 
interior vale defied the invaders. The persecutors turned in 
alarm from the narrow pass where every crag concealed a 
marksman ; where huge stones were rolled upon their heads 
from the heights above ; where every cave and rock upon the 
mountain - side was tenanted by a fearless garrison. Here, 
within the borders of Italy itself, the popes have never been 
able, except for one unhappy interval, to enforce their author- 
ity. Here no mass has been said, no images adored, no papal 
rites administered by the native Yaudois. It was here that 
Henry Arnaud, the hero of the valleys, redeemed his country 
from the tyranny of the Jesuits and Rome ; and here a Chris- 
tain Church, founded perhaps in the apostolic age, has sur- 
vived the persecutions of a thousand years.Q 

The territory of the Yaudois embraces scarcely sixteen 
square miles. The three valleys can never have contained a 
population of more than twenty thousand. In every age the 
manners of the people have been the same. They are tall, 
graceful, vigorous ; a mountain race accustomed to labor or to 
hunt the chamois in his native crags. The women are fair 
and spotless ; their rude but plaintive hymns are often heard 
resounding from the chestnut groves ; their native refinement 
softens the apparent harshness of their frugal lives. ( 2 ) Over 
the whole population of the Yaudois valleys has ever rested 
the charm of a spotless purity. Their fair and tranquil coun- 
tenances speak only frankness and simplicity ; their lives are 
passed in deeds of charity, in honest labors, and in unvarying 
self-respect.( 3 ) The vices and the follies, the luxury and the 

C) Muston, i., p. 107. The Israel of the Alps is the most complete ac- 
count of the Vaudois. A work of great learning, research, and enthusiasm. 

( 2 ) Muston, i., p. 7. 

( 3 ) The moral vigor of the Vaudois is well attested for four or five cent- 
uries. See J. Bresse, Hist. Vaudois, p. 85, an unfinished history. So Au- 



200 THE VAUDOIS. 

crime, that have swept over Europe never invaded the happy 
valleys, unless carried thither by the papal troops. No pride, 
no avarice, no fierce resentment, disturbs the peaceful Yaudois ; 
no profanity, no crime, is heard of in this singular community. 
To wait upon the sick, to aid the stranger, are eagerly con- 
tended for as a privilege ; compassion, even for their enemies, 
is the crowning excellence of the generous race. When their 
persecutor, Victor Amadeus II., was driven from Turin by the 
French, he took refuge in the valleys he had desolated, in the 
cottage of a Yaudois peasant. Here he lived in perfect secu- 
rity. The peasant might have filled his house with gold by 
betraying his guest ; he refused ; the duke escaped, and re- 
warded his preserver with characteristic parsimony. In the 
French wars of the last century, when Suwarrow was victorious 
among the Alps, three hundred wounded Frenchmen took 
shelter in the village of Bobbio. The Yaudois cared for their 
former persecutors as long as their scanty means allowed, and 
then, taking the wounded soldiers on their shoulders, carried 
them over the steep Alpine passes and brought them safely 
to their native France. 

We may accept, for we can not refute, the narrative of their 
early history given by the Yaudois themselves. Q Soon after 
the dawn of Christianity, they assert, their ancestors embraced 
the faith of St. Paul, and practiced the simple rites and usages 
described by Justin or Tertullian. The Scriptures became 
their only guide ; the same belief, the same sacraments they 
maintain to-day they held in the age of Constantine and Syl- 
vester. They relate that, as the Romish Church grew in pow- 
er and pride, their ancestors repelled its assumptions and re- 
fused to submit to its authority ; that when, in the ninth cent- 
ury, the use of images was enforced by superstitions popes, 
they, at least, never consented to become idolaters ; that they 
never worshiped the Virgin, nor bowed at an idolatrous mass. 



thentic Details of the Waidenses, p. 48. Mustou, Hist. Vaucl., i.; and see 
Israel of the Alps. 

C) The Vaudois writers concur in placing their own origin at a period 
before Constantine. Leger, i,, p. 25 et $eq. 



THE BABBES. 201 

When, in the eleventh century, Eome asserted its suprema- 
cy over kings and princes, the Vaudois were its bitterest foes. 
The three valleys formed the theological school of Europe. 
The Yaudois missionaries traveled into Hungary and Bohe- 
mia, France, England, even Scotland, and aroused the people 
to a sense of the fearful corruption of the Church.Q They 
pointed to Eome as the Antichrist, the centre of every abomi- 
nation. They taught, in the place of the Romish innovations, 
the pure faith of the apostolic age. Lollard, who led the way 
to the reforms of Wycliffe, was a preacher from the valleys ; 
the Albigenses of Provence, in the twelfth century, were the 
fruits of the Yaudois missions ; Germany and Bohemia were 
reformed by the teachers of Piedmont ; Huss and Jerome did 
little more than proclaim the Yaudois faith ; and Luther and 
Calvin were onlgr the necessary offspring of the apostolic 
churches of the Alps. 

The early pastors of the Yaudois were called barbes ;( 2 ) 
and in a deep recess among the mountains, hidden from the 
persecutor's eye, a cave is shown where in the Middle Ages a 
throng of scholars came from different parts of Europe to 
study the literature of the valleys.Q The barbes were well 
qualified to teach a purer faith than that of Rome : a Yaudois 
poem, writen about 1100, called the " Noble Lesson," still ex- 
ists, and inculcates a pure morality and an apostolic creed ;( 4 ) a 
catechism of the twelfth century has also been preserved ; its 
doctrines are those of modern Protestantism. The Yaudois 
Church had no bishop ;( 5 ) its head was an elder, majorales, who 
was only a presiding officer over the younger barbes. But 
in that idyllic church no ambition and no strife arose, and 



(*) Peyran, Nouvelles Lettres surles Vaudois, Lett, ii., p. 26 : " La religion 
des Vaudois s'est etendue presque dans tous les endroits de l'Europe ; non 
seulement parmi les Italiens." 

( 2 ) Barbe means uncle. Leger, p. 205 : "C'estoit l'appeller oncle" — a 
name always honorable in the South of France. 

( 3 ) Bresse, Hist. Vaudois. 

( 4 ) Raynouard, Mon. Langue Romane, ii., p. 37. 

( 5 ) Authentic Details, etc. : " Four of the best-informed pastors agreed 
that they never had any bishops at any time." 



202 THE VAUDOIS. 

each pastor strove only to excel his fellows in humility and in 
charitable deeds. 

From Constantine to Hildebrand, from the third to the 
eleventh century, the Yaudois, we may trust, cultivated their 
valleys in peace.Q The Roman Church, engaged in its strife 
with emperors and kings, overlooked or despised the teachers 
of the mountains. In the contest of giants, the modest shep- 
herds were forgotten. Yet they aimed with almost fatal ef- 
fect the rustic sling of truth against the Roman Philistine. 
Nothing is more plain than that from the twelfth to the fif- 
teenth century the people of Europe were nearly united in 
opposition to the Roman See. The Popes had never yet been 
able to reduce to subjection the larger portion of the Chris- 
tian Church; it was only over kings and princes that their 
victories had been achieved. Every country in Europe swarm- 
ed with dissidents, who repelled as Antichrist the Bishop of 
Rome ; who pointed with horror and disgust to the vices and 
the crimes of the Italian prelates and the encroaching monks. 
In Languedoc and Provence, the home of the troubadour and 
of mediaeval civilization, the Roman priests were pursued to 
the altars with shouts of derision.( 2 ) Bohemia, Hungary, and 
Germany were filled with various sects of primitive Chris- 
tians, who had never learned to worship graven images, or to 
bow before glittering Madonnas. Spain, England, Scotland, 
are said by the Yaudois traditions to have retained an early 
Christianity. In the fourteenth century it is certain that 
nearly half England accepted the faith of Lollard and "Wyc- 
liffe. The Romish writers of the thirteenth century abound 
in treatises against heretics ;( 3 ) the fable of a united Christen- 
dom, obeying with devoted faith a Pope at Rome, had no cre- 
dence in the period to which it is commonly assigned ; and 
from the reign of Innocent III. to the Council of Constance 
(1200-1414) the Roman Church was engaged in a constant 

( x ) The feeble condition of the papacy from 800 to 1000 left it with but 
little influence in the West. Spain and France were quite independent. 

( 2 ) Milman, Latin Christianity, iv., p. 260. 

( 3 ) Reinerius, Moneta, Mapes (1150), and others. So many papal bulls, 
sermons, etc. 



THE POPES AND THE VAUDOIS. 203 

and often doubtful contest with the widely diffused fragments 
of apostolic Christianity. Q 

The Popes had succeeded in subjecting kings and emperors ; 
they now employed them in crushing the people. Innocent 
III. excited Philip of France to a fierce Crusade against the 
Albigenses of the South ; amidst a general massacre of men, 
women, and children, the gentle sect sunk, never to appear 
again. Dominic invented, or enlarged, the Inquisition ; and 
soon in every land the spectacle of blazing heretics and tort- 
ured saints delighted the eyes of the Komish clergy.( 2 ) Over 
the rebellious kings the popes had held the menace of inter- 
dict, excommunication, deposition ; to the people they offered 
only submission or death. The Inquisition was their remedy 
for the apostolic heresies of Germany, England, Spain — a sim- 
ple cure for dissent or reform. It seemed effectual.Q The 
Albigenses were perfectly extirpated. In the cities of Italy 
the Waldenses ceased to be known. Lollardism concealed it- 
self in England ; the Scriptural Christians of every land who 
refused to worship images or adore the Virgin disappeared 
from sight; the supremacy of Kome was assured over all 
Western Europe. 

Yet one blot remained on the fair fame of the seemingly 
united Christendom. Within the limits of Italy itself a peo- 
ple existed to whom the mass was still a vain idolatry, the real 
presence a papal fable ; who had resisted with vigor every in- 
novation, and whose simple rites and ancient faith were older 
than the papacy itself. What waves of persecution may have 
surged over the Yaudois valleys in earlier ages we do not 
know ; they seem soon to have become familiar with the cru- 
elty of Rome ; but in the fifteenth century the Popes and the 
Inquisitors turned their malignant eyes upon the simple Pied- 
montese, and prepared to exterminate with fire and sword the 
Alpine Church. 

(*) Mosheim, ii., enumerates sjome of the various sects. 

( 2 ) Milman, Lat. Christ., iv., p. 266. 

( 3 ) JanuSj Pope and Council, cap. xvi., has a brief and careful review of 
the rigor of the Inquisition from 1200 to 1500 ; the popes named all the In- 
quisitors. See p. 194-196. 



204 THE VAUDOIS. 

And now began a war of four centuries, the most remarka- 
ble in the annals of Europe. On the one side stood the peo- 
ple of the valleys — poor, humble, few. Driven to resistance 
by their pitiless foes, they took up arms with reluctance ; they 
fought only for safety ; they wept over the f allen.Q Yet it 
soon appeared that every one of the simple mountaineers was 
a hero ; that he could meet toil, famine, danger, death, with a 
serene breast in defense of his loved ones and his faith ; that 
his vigorous arm, his well-ordered frame, were more than a 
match for the mercenary Catholic, the dissolute Savoyard; 
that he joined to the courage of the soldier the Christian ardor 
of the martyr ; that he was, in fact, invincible. For four cent- 
uries a Crusade almost incessant went on against the secluded 
valleys. Often the papal legions, led by the Inquisitors, swept 
over the gentle landscape of Lucerna, and drove the people 
from the blazing villages to hide in caves on the mountains, 
and almost browse with the chamois on the wild herbage of 
the wintry rocks. Often the dukes of Savoy sent well-train- 
ed armies of Spanish foot to blast and wither the last trace of 
Christian civilization in San Martin or Perouse. More than 
once the best soldiers and the best generals of Mazarin and 
Louis XIY. hunted the Vaudois in their wildest retreats, mas- 
sacred them in caves, starved them in the regions of the gla- 
ciers, and desolated the valleys from San Jean to the slopes of 
Guinevert. Yet the unflinching people still refused to give 
up their faith. Still they repelled the idolatry of the mass ; 
still they mocked at the Antichrist of Rome. In the deepest 
hour of distress, the venerable barbes gathered around them 
their famine-stricken congregations in some cave or cranny of 
the Alps, administered their apostolic rites, and preached anew 
the Sermon on the Mount. The Psalms of David, chanted in 
the plaintive melodies of the Yaudois, echoed far above the 
scenes of rapine and carnage of the desolate valleys ; the apos- 
tolic Church lived indestructible, the coronal of some heaven- 
piercing Alp. 

( a ) Gilly, Excursion, has various legends of the early wars. Perrin and 
Leger are the authorities. 



THE ALPINE CHURCH. 205 

The Popes, the leaders of the Inquisition, the dukes of 
Savoy, bigoted and cruel, often condescended to flatteries and 
caresses to win those they could not conquer. They offered 
large bribes to the poorest mountaineer who would consent 
to abandon the Church of his fathers and betray the haunts 
of the heretic. Wealth, honors, the favor of his king and of 
the Romish priests, awaited him who would recant ; an easy 
path of preferment lay open to the young men of the valleys, 
accustomed only to toil and want ; they were tempted as few 
other men have ever been. Yet the papal bribes were even 
less successful than the papal arms. A few imbeciles who 
had lost their moral purity alone yielded to the allurements 
of gain and pleasure; the great body of the Yaudois youth 
rejected the offers with disdain. The stately magnanimity of 
the " Noble Lesson," the simple principles of their ancient cat- 
echism,^) taught them in their plain churches by some learned 
yet gentle barbe, raised them above those inferior impulses 
by which the corrupt world beneath them was controlled. 
No hereditary vices tarnished their fair organizations; no 
coarse disease impaired their mental and moral vigor. With 
a wisdom above philosophy, they saw that it was better to live 
with a calm conscience a frugal life than to revel in ill-gotten 
gold. They clung to their mountains, their moral purity, and 
their faith. Generation after generation, fiercely tried, hard- 
ly tempted, never wavered in their resolve. The war of four 
centuries for liberty of conscience, for freedom to worship 
God, was accepted by the youthful Yaudois as their noblest 
inheritance. The contest went on with varying success but 
equal vigor, and ceased only in its final consequences when the 
triumphant voice of Garibaldi proclaimed Italy forever free. 

Pope Innocent VIII., a man of rare benevolence, according 
to the Romish writers, and a devoted lover of Christian union, 
resolved (1487) to adorn his reign by a complete extinction of 
the Vaudois heresy. He issued a bull summoning all faithful 
kings, princes, rulers, to a crusade against the children of the 

( J ) Faber, Hist., etc., of tlie Ancient Waldenses, London, 1838, may be 
consulted, with some caution. It gives a clear review of the authorities 
for their antiquity. 



206 THE VAUDOIS. 

valleys. Q ~No heretic was to be spared ; his goods, his life, 
were declared forfeited unless he would consent to attend 
mass. The Pope, or his Inquisitor, enumerated in a pastoral 
letter the crimes of the Yaudois. He charged them with call- 
ing the Roman Church a church of the evil one;( 2 ) of de- 
nouncing the worship of the Virgin, the invocation of saints ; 
of asserting, with unblushing boldness, that they alone pos- 
sessed the pure doctrine of the apostles. To Albertus Capi- 
taneus was committed the sacred trust of leading an army 
into the guilty region, and executing upon its people the sen- 
tence of Rome. The Catholics gathered together in great 
numbers at the appeal of the Chief Inquisitor ; a tumultuous 
throng of soldiers, brigands, priests, entered the valleys and 
commenced a general pillage. But they were soon disturbed 
in their labors by the swift attacks of the Yaudois. The res- 
olute and fearless mountaineers sallied from their caves and 
ravines and drove the robbers before them. One Christian, 
armed only with the vigor of innocence, seemed equal to a 
hundred papists. The crusaders fled, beaten and affrighted, 
from the valleys ; the malevolent design of Innocent was never 
fulfilled ; and the Romanists asserted and believed that every 
Yaudois was a magician, and was guarded by an invisible spell. 
Yet still the perpetual persecution went on. The papal 
agents made their way into the lower portions of the valleys, 
seized the eminent barbes and faithful teachers, and burned 
them with cruel joy. The Yaudois never knew any respite 
from real and imminent danger. Ever they must be ready 
to fly to their mountains and caves; ever their trembling 
wives and children were exposed to the cruelty and cunning 
of the envious priests. ( 3 ) The sixteenth century opened. 

C) See the bull issued by Innocent (Leger, part ii., p. 8). He calls upon 
" duces, principes, comites, et temporales dominos civitatum, ut clypeum 
defensionis orthodoxse fidei assumant." 

( 2 ) The charges made by the Inquisitors were, " Qu'ils appelloient 
l'Cglise Romaine l'Cglise des malins," etc. 

( 3 ) Leger, p. 29. The monks crowded into the valleys. In 1536, there 
was a severe persecution. In 1537, a barbe of great eminence was burned. 
The valleys were frequently plundered. 



THE JESUITS IN THE VALLEYS. 207 

The Reformation came, and the chief reformers of France 
and Germany entered into a friendly correspondence with the 
barbes and churches of Piedmont. They admitted the pu- 
rity of their faith, the antiquity of their rites. But the rise 
of the Reformation served only to deepen the rage of the 
papists against the children of the valleys. The darkest days 
of the Vaudois drew near, when their enemies could for a mo- 
ment boast that the last refuge of Italian heresy had fallen 
before their arms. 

In 1540, the society of Loyola began its universal war 
against advancing civilization. The Inquisition was renewed 
with unparalleled severity; the cities of Italy were hushed 
into a dreadful repose ; the Protestants of Venice were thrown 
into the Adriatic; the reformers of Rome died before the 
Church of Santa Maria.Q Italy was reduced to a perfect 
obedience to the papal rule, and for the first time in the his- 
tory of its career of innovations the Roman Church was pow- 
erful and united at home. The iron energy of the Jesuits 
had crushed dissent. They next proceeded to declare and de- 
cide the doctrine of the usurping Church. The Council of 
Trent assembled (1545), and Loyola and Lainez slowly en- 
forced upon the hesitating fathers a rigid rule of priestly 
despotism. ( 2 ) Liberty of conscience was denounced as the 
chief of heresies; the opinions and the manners of mankind 
were to be decided at Rome ; the Pope was to be obeyed be- 
fore all earthly sovereigns, and his divine powers were ev- 
erywhere to be established by a universal persecution. The 
Council of Trent at once threw all Europe into a fearful com- 
motion. At the command of the Pope, the Jesuits, and the 
fathers of Trent, Charles V. began the first great religious 
war in Germany, and carried desolation and death to its fair- 
est borders. In France the French court drove the Huguenots 
to revolt by an insane tyranny. In Holland the rage of the 
Inquisitors had been stimulated by the lessons of Loyola. 



( 1 ) Ranke, Hist. Popes, Inquisition. 

( 2 ) See Janus, Pope and Council. The Jesuits silenced even the Ro- 
manists, p. 290. 



208 THE VAUDOIS. 

Of all its opponents Eome most hated the Yaudois. To 
bind one of the primitive Christians to the stake seemed to 
give strange satisfaction to their modern persecutors. In 
September, 1560, Pope Pius IY. and his holy college gather- 
ed at Eome to witness one of their favorite spectacles^ 1 ) A 
pile had been raised in the Square of St. Angelo, near the 
bridge over the Tiber. The people assembled in a great 
throng. The condemned, a pale and feeble young man, was 
led forth ; when suddenly he began to speak with such rare 
eloquence and force that the people listened ; the Pope grew 
angry and troubled, and the Inquisitors ordered the Yaudois 
to be strangled lest his voice might be heard above the flames. 
Pius IY. then saw the martyrdom in peace, and directed the 
ashes of his foe to be thrown into the Tiber. 

The martyr was John Louis Paschal, a young pastor of 
great eloquence, who had been called from Geneva to a con- 
gregation of Yaudois in Calabria. The post of danger had a 
singular charm for the brilliant preacher. He was betrothed 
to a young girl of Geneva. When he told her of his call to 
Calabria, "Alas 1" she cried, with tears, " so near to Eome, and 
so far from me !" Yet she did not oppose his generous re- 
solve, and he went to his dangerous station. Here his elo- 
quence soon drew a wide attention. He courted by his bold- 
ness the crown of martyrdom. He was shut up in a deep 
dungeon, was chained with a gang of galley-slaves, was brought 
to Eome, where Paul had, suffered, and was imprisoned in a 
long confinement.^) His persecutors strove to induce him to 
recant ; but no bribes nor terrors could move him. He wrote 
a last fond exhortation to Camilla Guarina, his betrothed ; his 
eloquence was heard for the last time as he was strangled be- 
fore the stake. ( 3 ) 

Innumerable martyrdoms now filled the valleys with per- 
petual horror. It is impossible to describe, it is almost in- 

(*) The story of Paschal may he found at length in Muston, i., p. 85 j Gil- 
lies, p. 178, etc. 

( 2 ) Mnston, i., p. 82. He entered Rome by the Ostian gate, by the path 
of the ancient martyrs. 

( 3 ) The Yaudois in Calabria were extirpated by a horrible persecution. 



PAPAL PERSECUTORS. 209 

human to remember, the atrocities of the papal persecutors. 
Neither sex nor age, innocence, beauty, youth, softened their 
impassive hearts. Mary Eomaine was burned alive at Koche- 
Plate ; Madeleine Fontane at St. John. Michel Gonet, a man 
nearly a hundred years old, was burned to death at Sarcena. 
One martyr was hacked to pieces with sabres, and his wounds 
filled with quicklime; another died covered with brimstone 
matches, that had been fastened to his lips, nostrils, and every 
other part of his body ; the mouth of another was filled with 
gunpowder, the explosion tearing his head to pieces. The 
story of a poor Bible-seller from Geneva is less revolting than 
most of these dreadful scenes.Q Bartholomew Hector wan- 
dered among the peaks of the highest Alps selling the printed 
Scriptures to the poor shepherds, who in the brief summer, 
when the mountains break forth into a rich growth of leaves, 
grass, and flowers, lead their flocks to the higher cliffs. They 
bought the Bibles readily, and the colporteur climbed cheer- 
fully from peak to peak. The police seized him and carried 
him to Pignerol. He was charged with having sold heretical 
books ; he insisted that the Bible could not be called heretical ; 
but the Holy Office condemned him, June 19th, 1556, and he 
was sentenced to be burned alive ; some alleviation of the pen- 
alty was afterward made, and the judges permitted the exe- 
cutioner to strangle him before the burning. He was offered 
his life and liberty if he would recant ; he replied by preach- 
ing in his prison, with wonderful eloquence, the pure doctrines 
of the book he had loved to distribute. Amidst the brilliant 
palaces of Turin, in the public square, the happy martyr died, 
surrounded by a throng of people who wept over his fate. 
The priests were unable to suppress that proof of a lingering 
humanity. Five Protestants from Geneva were traveling to- 
ward the Yaudois valleys. They were warned that the police 
were watching for them, yet they still pressed on, and were 
arrested in an unfrequented road where they had hoped to es- 
cape pursuit. Two of them, Yernoux and Laborie, were pas- 
tors of the valleys. They were all taken before the Inquisi- 

( 5 ) MustoD, i., p. 108. 
14 



210 THE VAUDOIS. 

tors at Chambery, and convicted as heretics. They were next 
brought before the civil court to be condemned. The judges, 
touched by their innocence, strove to prevail upon them to re- 
cant. " You need only give us a simple confession of your 
errors," said the court ; " and this will not prevent you from 
resuming your faith in the future." They refused to consent 
to the deceit, and were sentenced to die. "Anne, my beloved 
sister and spouse," Q wrote Laborie to his young wife, " you 
know how well we have loved one another. I pray you, 
therefore, that you be always found such as you have been, 
and better, if possible, when I am no more." Calvin, hearing 
of their danger, wrote them an austere exhortation. In the 
stern spirit of that age of trial, he urged them to bear a testi- 
mony to the faith that should resound afar, where human 
voices had never reached. The five died full of hope. They 
were strangled, and their bodies burned.Q In this fatal pe- 
riod the public square of Turin was constantly made the scene 
of touching martyrdoms and holy trials ; the Jesuits and the 
Franciscans everywhere urged on the zeal of the Inquisitors ; 
no village of the Yaudois valleys but had its martyrs, no 
rock nor crag but witnessed and was hallowed by some joy- 
ous death ; the rage of persecution grew in strength until it 
could no longer be satisfied with less than a perfect extermi- 
nation of the Yaudois. 

Thus around the simple Christians of the valleys seemed to 
hang everywhere the omens of a dreadful doom. In the gen- 
eral tide of persecution, they could scarcely hope to escape a 
final destruction. From the towers and cathedrals of Turin 
the Jesuits( 3 ) looked with envious eyes upon the gentle race 
who neither plotted nor schemed ; to whom cunning was un- 
known, and deceit the ruin of the soul ; who never planned a 
persecution, fomented religious wars, or guided the assassin's 
hand ; who read the Scriptures daily, despite the anathemas 
of Rome, and who found there no trace of the papal suprem- 
acy or the legend of St. Peter. ( 4 ) The Yaudois, indeed, had 

O Muston, i., p. 115. ( 2 ) Id., i., p. 117. ( 3 ) Leger, p. 2. 

( 4 ) Peyran, Nouv. Lett., p. 61. The Waldenses always denied that Peter 
was ever at Rome. 



THE VAUDOIS DOOMED. 211 

never concealed their opinions. For centuries they had said 
openly that the Pope was Antichrist ;Q they had condemned 
each one of the papal innovations as they arose ; they de- 
nounced the Crnsades as crnel and unchristian; they gave 
shelter in their valleys to the persecuted Albigenses ; they 
smiled with gentle ridicule at the worship of saints and relics ; 
they scoffed at the vicious monks and priests who strove to 
convert them to the faith of Rome. Yet now they consent- 
ed to claim the clemency of their sovereign, the Duke of Sa- 
voy, and humbly begged for freedom of worship and belief. ( 2 ) 
They were so innocent that they could not understand why 
one Christian should wish to rob or murder another. 

But their prayers, their humility, and their innocence 
brought them no relief. The Council of Trent was about 
to re-assemble, and the Jesuits had resolved that its last sit- 
tings should be graced by a total destruction of the ancient 
churches of the valleys.Q A new crusade was begun (1560) 
against the Yaudois. The Pope, the Duke of Savoy, the 
kings of France and Spain, promoted the sacred expedition ; 
a large army, led by the Count of Trinity, moved up the val- 
leys; again the Jesuits offered to the people submission to 
the mass or death ; again the brave mountaineers left their 
blazing homes, and fled to the caves and crannies of the up- 
per Alps. The Count of Trinity was everywhere victorious. 
The barbes of St. Germain were burned in their own village, 
and the poor women of the parish were forced to bring fagots 
on their backs to build the funeral pile. The open country 
was desolated ; the mass was celebrated with unusual fervor 
amidst the dreadful waste ; and the Jesuits exulted with fierce 
joy over the ruin of the apostolic Church. But once more, 
as the winter deepened, the cliffs grew icy, and huge ava- 
lanches of snow hung over the path of the invaders, the Yau- 
dois fortified every ravine,( 4 ) barricaded the narrow passes, 

C 1 ) They said " pape e"toit l'antichrist, l'hostie une idole, et le purgatoire 
une fable." — Leger, p. 6. 

( 2 ) Leger, p. 31 : If the Turk and the Jew are tolerated, they said, why 
may not we have peace ? 

( 3 ) Leger, p. 33. ( 4 ) ld. } p. 34. 



212 THE VATJDOIS. 

and from their fastnesses and caves made vigorous attacks 
upon the foe. The Count of Trinity found himself threat- 
ened on every side. In the valley of Angrogna a few peas- 
ants held a whole army in check. Fifty Yaudois, in one 
engagement, nearly destroyed a detachment of twelve hun- 
dred persecutors. The Yaudois leaped like chamois from 
crag to crag, and with swift sallies cut off the wandering 
brigands ; they threw them over the cliffs, drowned them in 
the deep mountain torrents, or rolled huge stones upon their 
heads. The winter passed on full of disaster to the crusaders. 
Yet the condition of the Yaudois was even less tolerable. 
The snow and ice of the Alps blocked up the entrance to 
their hiding - places ; men, women, and children shivered in 
rude huts of stone on the bleak mountain - side ; food was 
scanty ; their harvest had been gathered by the enemy ; while 
far beneath them they saw their comfortable homes wasted 
by the Romish brigands, and their plain churches defiled by 
the pagan ceremonies of the mass. 

In the spring, as the flowers bloomed once more in the 
declivities of the mountains, and the banks of the torrents 
glowed with a new vegetation, the final trial of their faith and 
their valor drew near. At the upper extremity of the valley 
of Angrogna is a circle of level ground, called Pra del Tor, 
surrounded on all sides by tall hills and mountain peaks, and 
entered only by a narrow pass.Q Behind it is altogether safe 
from attack ; in front, in the ravines leading from below, the 
Yaudois had raised their simple barricades, and stationed their 
sentinels to watch the approach of the foe. Here, in this nat- 
ural fortress, they had placed their wives and children, their 
old and infirm, had gathered their small store of food and 
arms, and celebrated their ancient worship in a temple not 
made with hands. ( 2 ) The Co ant of Trinity meantime had re- 
solved upon their complete destruction. With a large and 
well-trained army he marched swiftly up the valley. His 

(*) Muston, i., p. 255, describes Pra del Tor as a deep recess amoug the 
mountains. 

( 2 ) Leger, p. 35-37. 



THE BATTLE OF PEA DEL TOE. 213 

forces consisted of nearly ten thousand men, and among 
them was a large body of Spanish infantry, the best soldiers 
of the age. The crusaders were inspired by the prospect of 
an easy success, by the superiority of their numbers, by the 
blessing of the Pope, and by his promise of a boundless indul- 
gence. A fierce fanaticism, a wild excitement, stirred by the 
exhortations of the Jesuits and the priests, ruled in the ranks 
of the invaders ; the Yaudois, behind their rocks, prayed with 
their gentle barbes, and with firm hearts prepared to die for 
their country and their faith. 

The battle of the Pra del Tor is the Marathon of Italian 
Christianity : it was invested with all the romantic traits of 
patriotic warfare. The army of the Count of Trinity, clad 
in rich armor and glittering with military pomp, marched 
in well-trained squadrons up the beautiful valley ; the clamor 
of the trumpets startled the chamois on his crags, and drove 
the eagle from her nest ; the waving plumes, the burnished 
arms, the consecrated banners, shone in the sunlight as they 
drew near the defenses of the mountaineers.Q Behind the 
Italian troops came the Spaniards, the bravest, the most big- 
oted of the crusaders. They, too, wore heavy armor, and were 
irresistible in the open field. In the rear of the invaders 
followed a band of plunderers, brigands, priests, prepared to 
profit by a victory that seemed perfectly assured. To this 
well-trained army were opposed only a few hundred Yaudois. 
They were stalwart and agile, but meagre with toil and fam- 
ine. Their dress was ragged, their arms broken and imperfect. 
To their brilliant assailants they seemed only an undisciplined 
throng ; a single charge must drive them routed up the val- 
ley. The Count of Trinity gave orders to attack, and the 
Savoyard infantry marched against the heretics. They were 
hurled back like waves from a sea-girt rock. The Yaudois 
filled the pass with a rampart of their bodies, and whenever 
the Pomish squadrons approached they were met by a rain of 
bullets, every one of which seemed directed with unerring aim. 

C) If I have drawn somewhat from fancy, yet the details may be in- 
ferred. See Leger, p. 39. 



214 THE VAUDOIS. 

The ground was soon covered with the dead, and the chant of 
thanksgiving resounded within the amphitheatre of the Alps. 

For four days the papal forces kept up their vain assault. 
The Yaudois still maintained their invincible array. "Within 
the fastness the wives and daughters, the aged and infirm, 
were employed in bringing food to their heroes, in supply- 
ing them with ammunition, and cheering them with words of 
faith. The Count of Trinity, enraged at his misfortune, at 
length ordered the Spanish infantry to charge. They came 
on in swift step to the clamor of martial music. But their 
ranks were soon decimated by the bullets of the patriots ; the 
officers fell on all sides ; and the well-trained troops refused 
any longer to approach the fatal pass. Four hundred dead 
lay upon the field. A wild panic seized upon the papal army, 
and it fled, disordered and routed, through the valley.Q 

Then the Yaudois came out from their hiding - places, and 
chased the crusaders along the open country far down to the 
borders of Angrogna. No mercy was shown to the ruthless 
papists. They were flung over the rocks into the fathomless 
abyss, shot down by skillful marksmen, as they strove to hide 
in the forest, and followed with pitiless vigor in their desul- 
tory flight. No trace remained of that powerful army that a 
few days before had moved with military pomp to the capture 
of Pra del Tor ) its fine battalions had been broken by the val- 
or of a few mountaineers ; a rich booty of arms and provisions 
supplied the wants of the heroes of the valley. 

From this time (1561) for nearly a century no new crusade 
was preached against the Yaudois. Their native sovereigns 
were satisfied with lesser persecutions. The barbes, as usual, 
were often burned ; the valleys were oppressed with a cruel 
taxation ; the earnings of the honest people were torn from 
them to maintain dissolute princes and indolent priests. In 
1596, Charles Emanuel ordered all the Yaudois, under pain of 
death or exile, to attend the preaching of the Jesuits, ( 2 ) and 



C) See narrative of Scipio Lentulus in Leger, part ii., p. 35. 
( 2 ) "D'Andare alle prediche delli reverendi padri Jesuiti," etc. Leger, 
part ii. ; p. 61. The Jesuits united exhortation with severity. 



YAUDOIS PATIENCE. 215 

the valleys were filled with the disciples of Loyola, who strove 
to corrupt or terrify the youth of the early Church. To every 
convert was offered an exemption from taxation, and various 
favors and emoluments were heaped upon him who would 
attend mass. Yet the restless Jesuits were altogether unsuc- 
cessful. Their preaching and their bribes were equally con- 
temned by the happy mountaineers ; the Church still lived un- 
spotted from the world. Q During this period of tolerable 
suffering the valleys once more glowed with the products of 
a careful industry ; they were the homes of purity and thrift. 
Singular among their race, the inheritors of a long succession 
of elevated thought, the Yaudois have ever practiced an ideal 
virtue loftier than that of Plato. When feudalism taught 
that labor was dishonorable, the people of the valleys held ev- 
ery family disgraced that did not maintain itself by its own 
useful toil. When the learned Jesuits had proved that deceit 
was often lawful, the Yaudois declared that falsehood was the 
corruption of the soul. In the happy valleys no one desired 
to be rich, no one strove to rise in rank above his fellows. 
"While in the gifted circles of the European capitals the puri- 
ty of woman was scoffed at by philosophers and courtiers, in 
Luzerna and Perouse every maiden was a Lucretia. Crime 
had seldom been known in the peaceful valleys ; it was only 
in barbarous lands where the Jesuits ruled that the assassin 
aimed his dagger or the robber plied his trade.( 2 ) To harm 
no one, to be at peace with all men, to forgive, to pity, were 
the natural impulses of every Yaudois ; to heal the sick, to 
raise the low, to relieve the suffering stranger, formed the 
modest joys of the children of the valleys. In every age they 
remained the same ; in every age they were Christians. The 
seventeenth century of their faith, perhaps of their existence, 
found them still an uncorrupted church, teaching to the world 
unlimited freedom of conscience. For this they were willing 
to peril their lives and fortunes ; for this they had contended 

C) Peyran, Nouv. Lett., i. We may well accept the traditions of so 
truthful a race. 

( 2 ) Mustoo, i., livre yiii., £tat moral et religieus des valines. 



216 THE VAUDOIS. 

with popes and kings ; and on every cliff and mountain peak 
of their native land was inscribed in immortal deeds the inde- 
pendence of the soul.Q 

Meantime, while no change had taken place in the Alpine 
Church, its doctrines and rites had been accepted by all North- 
ern Europe. In the seventeenth century the papacy had lost 
its most powerful and warlike adherents. England in 1650, 
ruled by Cromwell, instructed by Milton, stood in the front 
rank of the progressive nations. Holland and Northern Ger- 
many maintained their free schools and their liberal press 
in defiance of the Jesuits and the Pope. France had been 
forced to tolerate the Huguenots. It was only over Italy and 
Spain that the Inquisition of Loyola, founded in 1541, held 
its terrible sway. There the papal power had been erected 
upon a relentless despotism, and the unhappy people were 
rapidly sinking to a low rank among civilized nations. The 
rule of the Jesuits was followed by a total decay of morals, 
a general decline of the intellect. Once Italy had been the 
centre of classic elegance, of the reviving arts, of the splen- 
dors of a new civilization. It was now the home of gross su- 
perstitions, a degraded priesthood, a hopeless people. Spain 
and Portugal, once the leaders in discovery, the rulers of the 
seas, had fallen into a new barbarism. The Jesuits, the In- 
quisition, alone flourished in their fallen capitals and deserted 
ports ; the manly vigor of the countrymen of the Cid had been 
corrupted by centuries of. papal tyranny. 

In the seventeenth century the Yaudois were the only pro- 
gressive portion of the Italian race.( 2 ) Every inhabitant of 
the valleys was educated ; the barbes were excellent teach- 
ers, their people eager to learn ; the laborers instructed each 
other as they toiled side by side on their mountains ; their in- 
dustry was the parent of active minds. If they produced no 
eminent poet to sing of dreadful war, no astute philosopher, 
no vigorous critic, they could at least point to several native 

C) J. Bresse, Hist. Vaud., p. 39. 

( 2 ) Muston, Hist. Vaud., i., p. 394: "Nos temples ne sont de'core's ni de 
croix ui d'images," etc. 



THE "NOBLE LESSON." 217 

historians of considerable merit; to their "Noble Lesson," 
the finest of mediaeval poems; to their stirring hymns and 
versions of the Psalms ;Q to a long succession of intelligent 
barbes ; to their missionaries of the Middle Ages ; to their col- 
leges and schools in Alpine caves. They might claim that 
the ideas of the valleys had promoted the civilization of En- 
rope, and that their perpetual protest in favor of liberty of 
thought had been of more value to the world than Tasso's 
epic or Raphael's Madonnas. 

A pestilence swept over the valleys in 1630 ; nearly all the 
pastors died, and the Vaudois were forced to send to Geneva 
for a new band of teachers. The Calvinistic system of gov- 
ernment, in a milder form, was now adopted ; the name of 
barbe was no longer used ; the ruling elder was called a mod- 
erator ; the pastors were usually educated at Geneva ; and the 
ancient catechism of the twelfth century was exchanged for a 
modern compilation. ( 2 ) Yet the "Vaudois have never consent- 
ed to be called Calvinists, Protestants, or Reformers ; they in- 
sist that they are primitive Christians, who have never changed 
their doctrine or their ritual since the days of St. Paul ;( 3 ) who 
have beheld untainted all the corruption of the Eastern or the 
Western Church ; whose succession from the apostles is proved 
by no vain tradition, no episcopal ordination, but by an unin- 
terrupted descent of Christian virtues and an apostolic creed. 
They modestly assert that they have ever used the simple rit- 
ual employed by James, the brother of the Lord, at Jerusalem, 

(*) Raynouard, ii., p. 71 et seq., gives extracts from the early Vaudois 
poems. The fine hymn, Lo Payre Eternal, contrasts boldly with the feeble 
Romish hymns to Mary or the saints. 

( 2 ) Muston, Israel of Alps, i., p. 310. 

( 3 ) The Middle -age Protestant hymn, Lo Payre Eternal (The Eternal 
Father), expresses the noble feeling of the mountain church. I add a few 
lines. The poet calls on God to pity and forgive, and then asks to reign 
with him in a celestial kingdom. 

"Rey glorios, regnant sobre tuit li regne, 

Fay me regner cum tu al tio celestial regne 
Que yo chante cum tuit li saut e sempre laudar te degne." 

See Raynouard, ii., p. 117. With this contrast a feeble chant to the Virgin : 

" O Marie ! de Dieu mere, Dieu t'est et fils et pere !" 



218 TEE VAUDOIS. 

or Paul at Antioch ; and that they prefer to retain unchanged 
the name they bore before the Popes wore the tiara of Anti- 
christ, and before Christians were oppressed by the corruptions 
and the crimes of a visible Church. 

So much liberality of doctrine, such purity of life and faith, 
could not fail to deserve the constant hostility of the Jesuits. 
That famous company was now in the maturity of its early 
vigor. Its flourishing colleges filled the Catholic capitals of 
Europe ; its countless members, bound by their terrible oath 
of obedience, moved like a united army upon the defenses of 
the reformed faith. They had subjected Italy, had desolated 
Spain ; they once more turned the whole energy of the united 
order to the extirpation of the children of the valleys. In 
1650, the Jesuits founded a propaganda at Turin in imitation 
of that at Pome.Q Its design was to spread the Poman faith, 
to extirpate heresy by all the most powerful instruments of 
force or fraud. A council was formed, composed of the most 
eminent citizens, who were to act as general Inquisitors. 
Among them were the Marquis of Pianessa, the Grand Chan- 
cellor, the President of the Senate ; its chief officer was the 
Archbishop of Turin. Connected with the propaganda was a 
council of distinguished and wealthy women, who proved even 
more zealous than the men. The noblest ladies of Turin join- 
ed in the new crusade ; large sums of money were collected to 
aid the movement ; the emissaries of the two councils united 
in visiting families suspected of heretical practices, and in striv- 
ing to win over converts by intimidation or bribes. The poor 
serving-woman from the valleys was often assailed by a no- 
ble tempter ; the heretics of a higher rank were won by flatter- 
ies and attentions. The languid atmosphere of the capital of 
Savoy was stirred by the new effort to propagate the creed of 
Pome. 

From the higher peaks of their native Alps the Yaudois 
look down upon the palaces and cathedrals of Turin. Before 
them lies that magnificent scene with which Hannibal stimu- 

C) Leger, part ii., p. 73, describes the Jesuit propaganda at Turin, and 
imputes to it all the misfortunes of his country. 



OMENS OF DANGER. 219 

lated the avarice of his toil-worn arniy as he pointed out the 
path to Rome. But in the seventeenth century the rude vil- 
lage of the Taurini had grown into a powerful and splendid 
city ; the landscape was rich with the product of centuries of 
toil; the plains of Piedmont were the gardens of the age. 
The Yaudois, ever loyal and forgiving, had never failed in 
their duty to their sovereigns. The dukes of Savoy, always 
their worst persecutors, seem yet to have obtained their last- 
ing regard. They appealed to their clemency in moments of 
danger. They had usually been sternly told to choose be- 
tween the mass and ruin. Yet, in 1650, they had enjoyed a 
period of comparative rest ; and little did they foresee, as they 
looked down upon the city of their sovereign and the rich 
plains around, that the great and the noble were plotting their 
destruction, that the last crowning trial of their ancient Church 
was near at hand. 

The first omen of danger was a new influx of Jesuits. The 
valleys were thronged with haggard and fanatical missionaries. 
They pressed into remote districts, and celebrated mass in 
scenes where it had never been heard before. A ceaseless 
plotting went on against the faithful Yaudois ; every art was 
employed to bribe the young ; to arouse the pastors to a dan- 
gerous resistance ; to disturb the harmony of families and fill 
the valleys with domestic strife. In Turin the Inquisition 
sat constantly, and before its hated tribunal were summoned 
the most noted of the Yaudois. If they failed to appear, their 
goods were forfeited, their lives in peril ; if they came, they 
probably disappeared forever from human sight. The dun- 
geon, the rack, and the auto-da-fe awaited those who denied 
the infallibility of the Pope. 

But the Jesuits refused to be satisfied with these isolated 
persecutions ;Q they pressed the Duke of Savoy to complete 
the ruin of the Alpine Church. The world has witnessed no 
sadder spectacle than that long reign of terrors that was now 
spread over the peaceful valleys. In January, 1655, was issued 

( J ) All the authorities unite in fixing the chief guilt of the massacres 
upon the Jesuits. See Leger, part ii., p. 72 et seq. 



220 THE VAUDOIS. 

the famous order of G-astaldo, the opening of the dreadful 
struggle. By this degree, sanctioned by the court of Turin, 
every Yaudois in the towns at the lower extremity of the val- 
leys was commanded either to attend mass or to abandon his 
home and fly to the upper villages. The whole heretic pop- 
ulation were to be shut up within a narrow region around 
Bobbio and Angrogna. It was a winter of singular sever- 
ity; the snow lay deep in the upper valleys; the torrents 
rolled down clad in ice ; the fields were covered with inunda- 
tions ; the ravines were almost impassable. Yet the sad and 
long procession of faithful Christians were forced to leave 
their comfortable homes in Lucerna or St. Jean and bear the 
horrors of the wintry march. The aged, the sick, the once- 
smiling children, the feeble and the young, the gentle ma- 
tron, the accomplished maid, set out in a pitiful throng on 
their dreadful journey.Q They waded hand-in-hand through 
the icy waters, broke the deep, untrodden snows, climbed the 
wintry hills, and sought refuge with their impoverished breth- 
ren of the Alpine villages. Yet no one recanted ; no native 
Yaudois would consent to escape the pains of exile by attend- 
ing an idolatrous mass. Whole cities and villages in the lower 
valleys were nearly depopulated ; families were reduced from 
ease and comfort to extreme and painful want; a fruitful 
region was desolated ; but the Jesuits were disappointed, for 
the indestructible Church survived among the mountains. 

Their next project was a war of extermination. A pretext 
was easily discovered: a priest had been found murdered in 
a Yaudois village ; a convent of Capuchins, planted in one of 
the ruined towns, had been broken up by an impetuous pas- 
tor ; the mass had been ridiculed ; the exiled people sometimes 
stole back to their desecrated homes. Turin was filled with 
ra^e: the duke decreed the destruction of the Yaudois. 
Again a crusade began against the people of the valleys. 
The historian Leger, who was a Yaudois pastor, and saw the 
sufferings and the heroism of his countrymen, has described 

C) Leger, part ii., p. 94 et seq. : " Se trouvant dans le cceur du plus rude 
hyver qu'ils ussent jamais senti." 



THE FLIGHT OF THE VAUDOIS. 221 

with startling minuteness the details of the persecution. The 
papal troops entered the valleys, roused by the priests and 
Jesuits to an unparalleled madness. Such cruelties, such 
crimes, have never before or since been perpetrated upon the 
earth ; the French Revolution offers but a faint comparison ; 
the tortures of Diocletian or Decius may approach their real- 
ity. The gentle, intelligent, and cultivated Yaudois fell into 
the power of a band of demons. Their chief rage was direct- 
ed against women and children. The babe was torn from the 
mother's breast and cast into the blazing fire ;(*) the mother 
was impaled, and left to die in unpitied agony. Often hus- 
band and wife were bound together and burned in the same 
pyre; often accomplished matrons, educated in refinement 
and ease, were hacked to pieces by papal soldiers, and their 
headless trunks left un buried in the snow. A general search 
was made for Yaudois. Every cave was entered, every crag 
visited, where there was no danger of resistance ; every for- 
est was carefully explored. When any were found, whether 
young or old, they were chased from their hiding-places over 
the snowy hills, and thrown from steep crags into the deep 
ravines below. No cliff but had its martyr ; no hill on which 
had not blazed the persecutor's fire. In Leger's history, print- 
ed in 1669, are preserved rude but vigorous engravings of the 
malignant tortures inflicted by the papal soldiers upon his 
countrymen. There, in the Alpine solitudes, amidst the snow- 
clad summits of the wintry hills, are seen the dying matron ; 
the tortured child ; the persecutor chasing his victims over 
the icy fields; the virgin snows covered with the blood of 
fated innocence; the terrified people climbing higher and 
higher up the tallest Alps, glad to dwell with the eagle and 
the chamois, above the rage of persecuting man.( 2 ) 

The Pope applauded, the Duke of Savoy rejoiced in the 

( x ) Leger, part ii., p. 110 et seq. : " Les petits enfans, impitoyablement ar- 
rache's des maraelles de leurs tendres meres, estoient empoigne's par les 
pieds," etc. The narrative is that of eye-witnesses, and from depositions 
made soon after. Men of eighty and ninety years were burned. 

( 2 ) The narrative of the persecution is too dreadful to be repeated, too 
horrible to be remembered. 



222 TEE VATJDOIS. 

massacres of the valleys. The Jesuits chanted their thanks- 
giving in the ruined villages". The Capuchins restored their 
convent. The Church of Eome ruled over the blood-stained 
waste. But when the news of the unexampled atrocities of 
the Alps came to the great Protestant powers of the North, 
when it was told in London or The Hague that the harmless 
people of the valleys, the successors of the apostles, had been 
slain in their villages and cut to pieces on their native cliffs, 
horror and amazement filled all men. The reformers of ev- 
ery land had long looked with interest and affection upon the 
Alpine Church ; had admired its heroism, had imitated its 
simplicity ; that it should perish amidst the savage cruelties 
of the Jesuits and the Pope they could scarcely bear. A loud 
cry of disgust and indignation arose from all the Northern 
courts.Q But one mind, the greatest and the purest that had 
descended upon the earth since the apostolic age, gave utter- 
ance to the common indignation. Milton was now Cromwell's 
secretary, and, although blind, watched over the affairs of Eu- 
rope. His quick perception, his liberal opinions, his ready 
learning, his easy Latin style, have given to the foreign corre- 
spondence of the Protector an excellence never to be equaled 
in the annals of diplomacy. To the learned, the liberal, the 
progressive Milton the Alpine Church must ever have been 
singularly dear. It reflected all his own cherished opinions; 
his own simplicity, naturalness, and love of truth; it was 
clothed with a halo of historic association that, to his poetic 
thought, covered it with immortal lustre. 

In one great sonnet Milton has condensed the indignation 
of the age.( 2 ) He cried to Heaven to avenge its slaughtered 
saints ; he paints with a mighty touch the cold Alps, the dy- 
ing martyrs, the papal monsters, the persecuted Church. No 
grander strain, no more powerful explication, has fallen from 
the pen of the lord of modern poetry. The stern enthusi- 
ast Cromwell shared Milton's indignation, and the poet and 
the soldier strove to preserve the Alpine Church. Milton 

(') See Gilly, Excur. ; Leger, ii., 240. 

( 3 ) " Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints," etc. 



MILTON WOULD SAVE THE VATJDOIS. 223 

wrote, in the name of the Protector, a courtly but vigorous ap- 
peal to the murderous Duke of Savoy. Cromwell said that 
he was bound to the Yaudois by a common faith ; that he had 
heard of their butchery, their exposure on the frozen Alps : 
he besought the duke to withdraw the edict of extermination. 
The letter was composed in Latin by Milton, and was copied, 
it is said, by one of his daughters. It is dated May 25th, 
1655, soon after the news arrived. All England mourned for 
the slaughtered saints, and Cromwell appointed a day of fast- 
ing and prayer for their deliverance. Large sums of money 
were collected in London for their support, and the Holland- 
ers were equally liberal. Milton's pen now knew no rest ; he 
wrote to the various Protestant powers to intercede for the 
Yaudois ; he. appealed to Louis XIY. of France to give shelter 
to the exiles and to aid in their preservation. " The groans 
of those wretched men, the Protestants of Lucerna, Angrogna, 
and the other Alpine valleys," Cromwell said, " have reached 
our ears." When the persecutions still continued he wrote in 
stronger terms ;Q and the bold and stern Sir Samuel Mor- 
land( 2 ) was sent as envoy to the court of Turin to remonstrate 
against its enormities. The embassador did not spare the 
papists, at least in words. He told the duke that angels were 
horrified, that men were amazed, and the earth blushed at the 
fearful spectacle. The Swiss cantons and the German princes 
united in a strong remonstrance. Said the Landgrave of 
Hesse: " Persecutions and butcheries are not the means to 
suppress a religion, but rather to preserve it." But no sense 
of shame reached the hearts of the monster duke and his Jes- 
uit advisers ; they pretended, with keen subtlety, to listen to 
the appeals of the Protestant powers, yet they still permitted 
the work of extermination to go on. 

Safe in the shelter of the Italian court and certain of the 
sympathy of that of France, the Jesuits and the Pope heard 
with secret joy the grief and rage of the arch-heretic Cromwell 
and his allies of the North. They resolved to persist in their 

C) Gilly, Narrative, gives the letters of Cromwell or Milton, p. 217-229. 
( 2 ) Gilly, Narrative, p. 229. 



224: THE VATJDOIS. 

dreadful labors until no trace of heresy should be left upon Ital- 
ian soil. It is probable that, had the Protector lived, the fleets 
of England might have avenged the Christians of the valleys ; 
that the artillery of the Puritans might have startled the Ital- 
ian potentates from their fancied security. But the great chief- 
tain died ; the greater poet sunk into a happy obscurity, from 
whence was to shine forth the highest fruit of his genius ; and 
all England was dissolved in fatal license under the dissolute 
reign of Charles. At his death the Jesuits rejoiced in the 
rule of James II., and confidently hoped to bring once more 
under the papal sway the land of Milton and Cromwell. It 
was a disastrous period for Protestantism. England no longer 
stretched forth its powerful arm to shield its weaker brethren. 
Holland seemed about to sink before the Catholic zeal of 
Louis XIY. Geneva trembled among its mountains. And 
at length the Jesuits prevailed upon the King of France to 
revoke the Edict of Nantes and commence a bitter persecution 
of the Huguenots. The best, the wisest, the most progressive 
of the French died in crowded prisons or by the arms of the 
papal butchers, or were glad to escape, impoverished, to for- 
eign lands. A perfect religious despotism prevailed in France, 
from which it was only rescued by the convulsive horrors of 
its Revolution. 

There was now no more hope for the Yaudois.Q Friend- 
less, except in the arm of Him who guided the avalanche and 
checked the raging torrent in its course, the poor and humble 
people, cheered by their gallant pastors, bore with patient joy 
the burden of a fearful existence. From 1655 to 1685 they 
suffered all the ignominies and all the cruelties that could be 
inflicted by the malevolent priests. The valleys were filled 
with monks and Jesuits, and bands of papal soldiers, who rav- 
ished the last loaf from the humble homes of the industrious 
Christians. Often the Yaudois, roused to resistance by some 
dreadful atrocity, would fly to arms and perform miracles of 

(*) Muston began his valuable labors, eel. 1834, by asserting, "La gloire 
des Vaudois est dans leur malheur." He had not yet looked forward to 
their present triumph. 



THE CAVE OF CASTELLUZO. 225 

valor amidst their native crags; war would rage again along 
the valleys ; and great armies of papists would march from 
Turin or Pignerol and chase the people to the mountains. 
Then the old, the sick, women and children, would be carried 
by the strong arms of their sons and their brothers to some 
secluded cavern, known only to themselves, and there hide 
for months until the danger seemed past ; in fact, the Vaudois 
learned, like the marmot, to make their homes in the living 
rock. 

One of these singular natural retreats of safety has perhaps 
been discovered by a modern traveler. He had searched for 
many days for the famous cavern of Castelluzo. The memo- 
ry of the place had been forgotten ; it was only known that 
down some dizzy precipice, overhanging a dreadful abyss, a 
cave existed, opening into the solid rock, where three or four 
hundred Yaudois had once lived safe from the Pope and the 
Jesuits. At length his guides assured the traveler that they had 
found the forgotten retreat. On a fair day of the Alpine au- 
tumn, when the golden fields were smiling with the gathered 
harvests, the stranger ventured to enter, with extreme hazard, 
the dangerous scene. He could scarcely conceive how old 
men, women, and children, amidst the snows of winter, could 
have descended into their only home. The entrance lay over 
a projecting crag. Far below opened a deep ravine, from 
which shot up a wall of rock. The cave was cut by Nature's 
hand in the side of the precipice. A rope-ladder was pro- 
vided and swung over the projecting cliff. It was made to 
rest on a slight ledge about fifty feet below. The guides de- 
scended, the traveler followed, and with great risk reached the 
grotto. It proved to be an irregular sloping gallery, formed 
by the overhanging cliffs. On one side a projecting crag shel- 
tered it from the weather ; before it opened the unf athomed 
abyss. A spring of water seemed to exist in one corner, and 
a few shrubs and plants grew in the interstices of the rock.Q 
The cave was shallow, light, and almost safe from attack. 
Only a single person could enter it at a time, and a single 

(') Waldensian Researches, Gilly, p. 513. 
15 



226 THE VAUDOIS. 

stalwart Yaudois might here defy an army. Yet there were 
no traces of its having been inhabited ; no smoke of Yaudois 
fires, nor remnants of arms or furniture ; and the traveler left 
the place still in doubt whether he had really found the fa- 
mous cave described by Leger, where nature had provided em- 
brasures, windows for sentinels, an oven, and a secure retreat 
for three hundred of his country men. Q 

At last, in 1685, came that fatal period so long anticipated 
with triumph by the Jesuits of Turin, when the voice of 
Christian prayer and praise was no longer heard in the val- 
leys. The wonderful people had survived for six centuries 
the enmity of the papacy ; but now the Alpine Church seem- 
ed forever blotted from existence. Louis XIY., the destroyer 
of the Huguenots and of France, pressed the Duke of Savoy 
to drive the heretics from his dominions. General Catinat, 
one of the best commanders of the time, led a well-appointed 
army into the valleys ; the people took up arms, and, with 
their usual heroism, at first baffled and defeated the efforts of 
the French ; then a lethargy seemed to pass over them, and 
they yielded to the foe. A dreadful punishment now fell 
upon them. The papal soldiers swept through the valleys, 
made prisoners of nearly the whole population, and carried 
them away to the dungeons of Turin. Fourteen thousand 
persons were shut up in a close confinement. The conse- 
quences were such as might have touched the hearts of Dio- 
cletian and Decius, but to the Jesuits and to Rome they were 
only a source of insane joy. The stalwart mountaineers, and 
their wives and children, shut out from their free Alpine air, 
starved and persecuted, pined in a horrible imprisonment. 
Diseases raged among them ; a pestilence came ; and of the 
fourteen thousand saints, the followers of Christ, only three 
thousand came, emaciated and pale, from their noisome dun- 
geons. Eleven thousand had died to satisfy the malice of 
Rome. 

There was now peace in the silent valleys ; villages without 
inhabitants, homes without a family, churches no longer filled 



0) Leger, i., p. 9. 



MASS CELEBRATED IN THE VALLEYS. 227 

with the eloquence of supplication. A few Eomanists alone 
occupied the silent scene. At length a colony of papists, gath- 
ered from the neighboring country, was sent in to take pos- 
session of the fields and dwellings of the Vaudois ; the church- 
es of the ancient faith were torn down or converted into Rom- 
ish chapels ; the Jesuits wandered freely from St. Jean to Pra 
del Tor. For the first time since the dawn of Christianity, 
the Virgin was worshiped beneath the crags of San Martino, 
and the idolatry of the mass desecrated the scene so long con- 
secrated by an apostolic faith. For three years the rule of the 
papists remained undisturbed. The sad remnant of the Vau- 
dois meantime had wandered to foreign lands. Several thou- 
sand climbed the Alps, and came, emaciated and wayworn, to 
the Swiss. Here they were received with sincere kindness, 
and found a momentary rest. Several of the pastors found a 
home in Holland ; at Leyden, Leger composed his history of 
his country. A colony of exiled Vaudois came afterward to 
America, and settled near Philadelphia ; others went to Ger- 
many or England. Some, perhaps, remained in the valleys, 
concealing their faith under a conformity with the Romish 
rule. And thus, in 1689, seemed forever dissipated that hal- 
lowed race, that assembly of the faithful, over whose career in 
history had ever hung a spotless halo of ideal purity. 

In the fearful winter of 1686-87, when the Rhone was 
frozen to its bed and the Alps were incrusted with ice, the 
papists drove the surviving remnant of the prisoners over the 
precipitous passes of Mont Cenis. The aged, the sick, women, 
children, the wounded, and the faint, climbed with unsteady 
steps the chill waste of snows, and toiled onward toward 
Protestant Geneva. Many had scarcely clothes to cover them ; 
all were feeble with starvation. The road was marked by the 
bodies of those that died by the way. The survivors stagger- 
ed down the Swiss side of the mountains, pallid with hunger 
and cold ; some perished as they approached the borders of the 
friendly territory ; others lingered a while, and expired in the 
homes of the Swiss. But the people of Geneva, as they be- 
held the melancholy procession approaching their city, rushed 
out in generous enthusiasm to receive the exiles to their arms. 



228 THE YAUDOIS. 

One-half the population went forth on the charitable journey. 
They contended with each other which should first give shel- 
ter to the poorest of the martyrs, and sometimes bore them in 
their arms from the frontiers to their comfortable dwellings. 
Geneva, the wonderful city of Calvin and Beza, revived in 
this period of woe the unbounded benevolence that had mark- 
ed the early Christians in their conduct toward each other un- 
der the persecutions of Maximin and Galerius. As the exiles 
entered the town they sung the psalm of persecuted Israel, 
" O God, why hast thou cast us off ?" in a grave, sad voice, and 
breathed out a melancholy wail over the ruin of their apostol- 
ic Church. Q 

An aged man appeared among the throng who came out 
to meet them ; it was Joshua Janavel, the exiled hero of the 
Yaudois. For many years Janavel had lived a fugitive at 
Geneva. Yet the fame of his wonderful exploits had once 
filled all Europe, and he still kept watch over the destiny of 
his native land. Had Janavel's advice been followed, the 
Yaudois believed that their country might yet have been free ; 
had his strong arm not been palsied by age, there would yet 
remain a hope of its deliverance. In the wild wars that fol- 
lowed the massacre of 1655, when the Marquis of Pianessa 
was ravaging the valleys, Janavel became the leader of a band 
of heroes. Born on the mountains, he crept through their 
passes and sprung from cliff to cliff at the head of his pious 
company, and waged a holy but relentless warfare with the 
murderous assailants. ( 2 ) With only six soldiers he surprised 
in a narrow pass a squadron of Hve hundred, and drove them 
from the hills. The next day, with seventeen men, he hid 
among rocks ; the enemy approached in force, and pressed into 
the ambuscade ; the crags were rolled upon them ; musket- 
balls rained from every cliff ; and as they fled, astonished, to 
the valley, the mountaineers, leaping from rock to rock and 



( L ) The music of the Vaudois is said to be sad, plaintive, and in a minor 
tone, as if the reflection of their life and persecution. Gilly, Researches, 
p. 221. 

( 2 ) For anecdotes of Janavel see Gilly, Narrative, p. 194 et seq. 



JANAVEL. 229 

hiding behind the woodlands, pursued them with fatal aim. 
The Marquis of Pianessa, the chief of the propaganda at Tu- 
rin, sent a still larger army against Janavel ; he was shut up 
against the front of a tall cliff ; and the Vaudois, with their 
backs to the rock, met the advancing foe. The popish army 
melted away like snow before them ; the Christians charged 
upon them with a cry of faith; and again the enemy were 
broken, with dreadful loss. 

Ten thousand men were next marched against the patriots. 
Meantime their commander, the Marquis of Pianessa, an ex- 
cellent example of chivalry and feudalism, a bright ornament 
of his church and court, wrote as follows to the Christian 
leader : " To Captain Janavel, — Your wife and daughter are 
in my power. If you do not submit, they shall be burned 
alive." Janavel replied, " You can destroy their bodies ; you 
can not harm their beloved souls. "Q The wild war raged 
all along the mountains. Janavel, and his famous associate, 
Jahier, beat back the great army of Pianessa, and avenged its 
terrible atrocities. Among those of the invaders most guilty 
of indescribable enormities was a band of eight hundred Irish 
Catholics. They had rejoiced to crush the heads of Protest- 
ant infants against the rocks, to hack in pieces gentle matrons 
and aged men, to fill blazing ovens with unresisting saints. 
Janavel now came upon them with a dreadful retribution. 
He surprised them in their barracks, and put them all to death. 
But Janavel was at last shot through the body. He recovered, 
and went, in 1680, an exile to Geneva ; and here he lived to 
aid in that remarkable expedition by which the Vaudois were 
once more restored to their valleys and their homes. 

While all Protestant Europe was lamenting the ruin of it's 
oldest Church, suddenly there passed before the eyes of men a 
wonderful achievement — a spectacle of heroism and daring 
scarcely rivaled at Marathon or Leuctra.Q It was named by 



C) Muston, part ii., ch. viii., p. 363, vol. i. 

( 2 ) Glorious Recovery, trans, from Henry Aruaud's account of his expe- 
dition ; Gilly, Excur., p. 174-183 ; Muston, ii., p. 33. The journals of the 
period also notice the return. 



230 THE VAUDOIS. 

the exulting Vaudois " The Glorious Beturn." The exiles at 
Geneva, tempted by various friendly invitations to emigrate 
to Protestant lands, still fondly lingered in the neighborhood 
of their native mountains. No promises of ease and opulence, 
no prospect of a foreign home, could allure them from the dis- 
tant view of Mont Cenis and the snow-clad Alps. At length 
the enthusiastic people, inspired by the brave spirit of the aged 
Janavel, and their priest and warrior, Henry Arnaud, began to 
entertain the design of invading once more their ancient val- 
leys — of reviving their apostolic Church. Yet never was a 
project apparently more hopeless. The Duke of Savoy, sus- 
pecting their design, had extended a chain of garrisons around 
all the mountain passes. The valleys were held by large ar- 
mies of French and Savoyards, and a hostile population filled 
all the towns and hamlets in Perouse, Lucerna, and San Mar- 
tino. If the exiles attempted to cross the Alps, they must cut 
their way through a succession of foes. When they reached 
the German asca and the Pelice, they would encounter the uni- 
ted forces of Italy and France. 

But Janavel inspired them with his own boundless resolu- 
tion. An expedition was prepared of nearly one thousand 
men ; and on the night of the 16th of August, 1689, a fleet of 
boats bore the adventurers over the peaceful waters of Lake 
Leman to the borders of Savoy. As they assembled in the 
forest of Eyon the aged warrior directed them all to kneel in 
fervent prayer. He could not go with them; he bid them 
choose, under the guidance of Heaven, a younger leader. It 
seems that a Captain Turrel was elected their commander. Q 
The whole army was divided into nineteen companies ; and 
the Vaudois began their swift march for the passes of the 
Alps. They evaded or dissipated the hostile garrisons, and 
swept rapidly up that memorable road by which Hannibal had 
crossed the unknown mountains. But the Vaudois were no 
strangers to the icy scene. They chose the most difficult paths 
to avoid the hostile soldiers, clambered from glacier to glacier, 
crept along the brink of the fearful precipice, dispersed the 

(*) Muston, ii., p. 38 et seq. 



"THE GLORIOUS RETURN." 231 

enemy by sadden attacks, and reached at length the pass of 
Mont Cenis. Here they captured the baggage of a Eoman 
cardinal who was on his way to Kome.Q Slowly and with 
unexampled endurance they climbed Mont Cenis, and, as they 
reached the top, sunk, incapable of motion, on the frozen snow. 
Their path now lay among the wildest and most inaccessi- 
ble portions of the Alps. With scanty food, but frequent 
prayers, they pressed over the snows toward their native val- 
leys. Soon their clarions sounded clearly from the summit 
of Tourliers, as they prepared to descend into the well-known 
scene and encounter the first shock of battle. 

Eight hundred now remained — vigorous, agile, fearless — 
many of them natives of Lucerna, San Martino, or Angrogna. 
They descended the snowy hills in a narrow line, wading 
through deep ravines. Their food was only a few chestnuts 
and half -frozen water; their dress was torn and comfortless. 
They slept on wintry crags, but they held fast to their arms 
and their scanty powder ; and their pastor and chief, Henry 
Arnaud, led them in fervent prayer, every morning and even- 
ing, as they clambered down the Alps. At length they ap- 
proached their beloved valleys ; but between lay the ravine of 
the Dora, crossed by a single bridge. Around was stationed a 
force of two thousand French, guarding the pass of Salber- 
trans. The eight hundred saw that they must fight their way 
across.( 2 ) It was a dim and misty night, and as they pressed 
on the Catholic settlers mocked them with evil tidings. When 
they asked them for . provisions, they replied, " Go on, you 
will soon have no need of food." They knelt for a few mo- 
ments, and then began the attack. Some one cried out, " The 
bridge is won !" The Yaudois rushed upon their enemy ; the 
French, terrified by their energy, abandoned their station in 
sudden panic ; and the eight hundred pressed over the bridge 
and cut down the enemy as they fled. JSTone were spared ; 
and in the dark, bewildering night the French soldiers wan- 

(*) Glorious Recovery ; Muston, ii., 45. 

( 2 ) Muston, i., p. 47, is fuller than Arnaud, and has used various unpub- 
lished letters, etc. 



232 THE VAUDOIS. 

dered among the Yaudois, and were shot or sabred without re- 
sistance. The moon now rose over the Alps, and disclosed 
seven hundred dead lying around the dark ravine; of the 
Yaudois only twenty-two had fallen. Once more they knelt, 
but it was now in thanksgiving ; they heaped together the 
ammunition they could not use, with all the remains of the 
French camp, and applied a torch to the pile; the explosion 
shook the mountains with an unaccustomed tremor, and as 
the sound died away a wild shout of joy arose from the Yau- 
dois — a cry of " Glory to the God of armies !" 

Worn with battle and victory, the exiles still pressed on 
the same night, often falling down in sleep, and then rousing 
themselves to climb over rocks and mountains, until, as the 
sun rose on the Sabbath morning, and the white peaks of the 
Alps were tinted with a bright rose-color, and the wide, wavy 
landscape gleamed before them, they saw the fair pinnacles of 
their own hills and the well-known valley of Pragela. They 
chanted a poetic prayer of thanksgiving on the mountain-tops, 
and descended to their home. The priests fled hastily from 
the valley ; the patriots tore the images and the shrines from 
their ancient churches, and celebrated their simple worship 
in its accustomed seats. For a time all was victory. They 
drove the enemy from the Balsille and its impregnable rocks, 
expelled the new inhabitants of Bobi, burned hostile Le Per- 
rier, and supplied themselves with arms at the cost of the foe. 
For food they found a resource in the plunder of French con- 
voys, and in secret stores of corn and nuts which they had 
hidden in the earth before their expulsion. But the enemy 
was now chiefly engaged in an attempt to starve them on the 
mountains. The Duke- of Savoy ordered the country to be 
desolated ; the flocks and cattle were driven away from the 
open valleys, the fruit-trees cut down, the harvests burned 
upon the fields, and the magnificent groves of chestnut and 
walnuts despoiled of their autumnal product. The poor Yau- 
dois, clinging to the cliffs and wandering upon the mountain- 
tops, still baffled the arms of the enemy ; but often they had 
only a few roots to eat, and their manly vigor must slowly 
melt away in famine and fatigue. Prayer was still their chief 



THE BALSILLE. 233 

support, and among their native crags they constantly lifted 
their voices to Heaven. For two months they had resisted 
the attack of twenty thousand men led by the skillful Catinat ; 
but by October 16th it seemed that the enterprise must whol- 
ly fail. Their numbers were diminished by desertions and 
death; many French refugees left them; even Turrel, the 
commander, despairing of success, fled from them secretly. 
Clothed in rags, feeding upon roots and herbs, the feeble Vau- 
dois saw before them the approaching winter and the swiftly 
increasing foe. Their prayerful hearts were oppressed with 
an unaccustomed dread. Liberty of conscience seemed about 
to depart forever from the valleys ; the Alpine Church was 
never again to rise from its desolation. But Henry Arnaud, 
pastor and chief, rose, in this moment of danger, to heroic 
greatness. He, at least, would never abandon his suffering 
country and the falling cause of freedom. He prayed, ex- 
horted, celebrated ' the sacred feast in groves of chestnut, 
fought in the front of his followers, and was ready to die for 
their preservation. Q In the midst of his calamities he re- 
membered the counsels of the aged Janavel, who had advised 
the adventurers, in a moment of extreme need, to take refuge 
upon the rock of Balsille, and there prolong the contest until 
help should come from above. 

In a wild portion of the valley of San Martino a pile of 
rock projects over an Alpine torrent, surrounded by huge 
mountains, accessible only from the bed of the stream below, 
and rising on three terraces against the sides of its lofty peak 
behind. It is called the Balsille. Swelled by the winter 
snows, a branch of the Germanasca sweeps around the singu- 
lar promontory. A few shrubs cover its top ; a little earth 
produces a scanty vegetation. The Balsille stands like an 
isolated column, yet on either hand it is commanded by the 
tall and almost inaccessible peaks of Le Pis and Guinevert. 
But in that wild and lofty region the climate is severe, the 
ravines and mountains almost perpetually covered with snow, 
the paths impassable except to the agile and daring Yaudois. 

(*) Glorious Recovery, p. 133 et seq., describes the Balsille. 



234: THE VAUDOIS. 

Secluded amidst the wildest scenery of the valleys, the Bal- 
sille forms an almost impregnable fortress : the history of its 
siege and its defense is the crowning wonder of " The Glori- 
ous Return." 

The exiles were now, October 22d, 1689, at Rodoret, sur- 
rounded by the enemy ; to reach the Balsille they must pass 
through the midst of their foes, over a path that led along the 
brink of frightful precipices, but which they could only trav- 
erse by night. They prayed long and fervently, and then set 
out in utter darkness. No moon nor stars guided them as 
they crept on their hands and knees along the edge of the 
deep abyss. To distinguish their guides, they marked them 
with strips of white cloth or pieces of phosphoric wood.Q 
Yet they passed safely, and in the morning trembled with 
affright as they saw over what a fearful path they had come. 
When they reached the Balsille they found only a bare and 
comfortless rock ; they were forced to build at once a fortress 
and a dwelling ; feeble and faint, they labored with incredible 
toil. They cut down trees, gathered huge stones, and formed 
seventeen intrenchments, rising one above the other, on the 
precipitous rock. They dug deep ditches, covered ways, and 
casemates to secure their lines. On the top of the Balsille 
they built a strong fort or castle, the centre of their defenses, 
surrounded by three high walls ; and, to provide their homes 
in that wintry climate, they dug in the earth and rock of the 
terraces eighty caves or chambers, where they slept in inno- 
cence more calmly, perhaps, than pope or priest. 

When they reached the rock they had no food for the next 
day, and lived upon a few vegetables they gathered in the 
neighborhood. At length they repaired a dismantled mill, 
and were enabled to bake bread. With joy and thankful 
hearts they discovered that the harvests of the last year lay 
buried beneath the snow in the valley of Pral, and reaped 
them through the winter by digging in the icy covering. But 
they were not suffered to remain undisturbed. On the 29th 

C) Glorious Recovery, p. 139. Muston has the narrative of a Vaudois 
officer — it adds something. 



WINTER OX THE BALSILLE. 235 

of October they saw the French troops approaching them on 
all sides : some climbed the precipitous peaks of Guinevert 
and Col du Pis : others approached the base of the fortified 
rock ; a vigorous attack was made on the intrenchments ; the 
sharp fire of the Vaudois marksmen scattered the enemy with 
great loss. The Alpine winter now came on. The French 
troops were driven from the mountains, with frozen limbs 
and fearful suffering, by the rigorous season ; the deep snows 
of the valleys prevented all military operations : and the ene- 
my withdrew, promising to return in the spring.^' 1 ) 

TTinter passed on in peace with the garrison of Balsille. 
Alone in the midst of a thousand dangers, shielded only by 
the icy snows, the Alpine Church lived on its lonely rock. In 
his singular castle and temple Henry Arnaud still maintained 
the ancient ritual of the valleys : twice on each Sabbath he 
preached to an attentive assembly ; morning and evening the 
voice of prayer and praise ascended to the peaks of Guinevert. 
The garrison was reduced to about four hundred, all native 
Vaudois. and their chief solace in their painful life was to join 
in the hymns and prayers they had learned from their moth- 
ers in their childhood.) 2 ) Yet they would not consent to re- 
main unemployed. Frequent expeditions were sent out to 
levy contributions on the popish villagers, to climb from crag 
to crag along the secure mountains and descend in sudden 
forays into the well-known valleys. They penetrated far 
down the banks of the Germanasca. and disturbed the repose 
of Lucerna and Angrogna. Meantime no help came from 
abroad : the expeditions formed in Switzerland for their re- 
lief were intercepted by the enemy : and. as the spring drew 
on. Arnaud and his pious company prepared to engage once 
more the united armies of France and Savoy. 

In April the Marquis De Pareilles sent them offers of lib- 
eral terms if they would surrender. A council was held on 
the rocks, and a unanimous refusal was decided upon. Ar- 
naud wrote to the marquis a defense of his countrymen : he 
said they had been seated from time immemorial in their val- 

C 1 ) Glorious Becovery, p. 143. (') *3-j P- 148. 



236 THE VAUDOIS. 

leys; that they had paid every impost, performed all the 
duties of good subjects ; that they had led lives of singular 
purity; that they fought only for self-preservation^ 1 ) On 
the last day of the month, a Sabbath morning, as Arnaud was 
preaching to his garrison, the troops of Catinat were seen clos- 
ing around the solitary fortress. With a rare endurance, 
scarcely surpassed by the native Yaudois, the French and 
Savoyards had cut their way through the deep snows of the 
ravines and climbed the frightful precipices. A whole regi- 
ment, amidst blinding sleet and icy winds, had fixed them- 
selves on the pinnacle of Guinevert, overlooking the Balsille. 
Another appeared on the top of Le Pis, and opened a distant 
fire on the fort. In the valley in front Catinat ordered a 
chosen band of Hve hundred men to climb the steep ascent 
of the Balsille, and charge the rude intrenchments of the Yau- 
dois. ( 2 ) The French attacked with singular gallantry ; they 
strove to tear away the felled trees behind which their enemy 
was sheltered, and climbed the rude wall of stone ; but a rain 
of balls came from the Yaudois, a shower of rocks rolled upon 
the assailants; their ranks were soon broken, and they fled 
down the hill. Great numbers were slain ; the Yaudois leap- 
ed from their works, and destroyed nearly all the detachment. 
Its commander, Colonel De Parat, was wounded and taken 
prisoner. The next day the Yaudois cut off the heads of their 
fallen foes and planted them along the line of their first pali- 
sade. It was a symbol of unchanging defiance. 

Arnaud defends with vigor the severe policy he had adopt- 
ed. He killed the prisoners, he says, because it was impossi- 
ble to hold them ; he spared every non-combatant, and never 
retaliated the cruelties endured by his countrymen. Once 
more, May 10th, the French army, under De Feuquieres, gath- 
ered around the Balsille. They numbered about thirteen 
thousand men. A battery of cannon had been placed, with 
great labor, on the side of Guinevert ; the hills around were 
filled with troops, and the rock itself was surrounded on ev- 

C) Glorious Recovery, p. 159, gives the number of the enemy as 22,000. 
( 2 ) Id., p. 167. 



THE VAUDOIS FLY. 237 

ery side by the hostile forces. The French commander made 
a last effort to persuade the Yandois to submit. Q He offered 
each man five hundred louis and a free passage from the coun- 
try ; but his great bribes were rejected, and the garrison de- 
termined to persist in a vain resistance. With prayers and 
holy songs they prepared for the final contest. In a first 
attack the French were repulsed with signal loss. But at 
length the batteries began to play on the works of the Yau- 
dois, and their feeble fortifications crumbled to the earth. 
The enemy slowly made their way up the height ; the Yau- 
dois were even driven from the castle, and fled to a higher 
part of the rock. Night fell, and the French commander 
ceased his assault, resolved to capture the whole garrison in 
the morning. 

Clustered like hunted chamois on the pinnacles of the rock, 
the Yaudois now sought eagerly for some method of escape.( 2 ) 
But as yet there seemed no prospect of deliverance. The en- 
emy lay encamped on every side of the Balsille ; his watch-fires 
dispelled the darkness of the night, and sentinels, posted thick- 
ly around, closed up every avenue of flight. Arnaud and his 
brave companions were guarded by a circle of foes who had 
resolved that no Yaudois should be left alive upon the mount- 
ains. But, as the night advanced, a friendly mist, sent in an- 
swer to their prayers, slowly rose from the deep glens and 
covered the whole valley with a humid veil. The agile 
mountaineers, led by a skillful guide, crept down the slippery 
rocks, climbed in single file over the deep chasms of the Ger- 
manasca, and reached the base of Guinevert. Here they cut 
steps in the hardened snow, and, with terrible suffering, drag- 
ged themselves on their hands and knees up the steep declivi- 
ties, until at length they stood on a wide glacier, far above the 
reach of the enemy. A clamor of thanksgiving arose from 
the little company as they felt once more that they were free. 
The morning broke. The French sprung up the hill to seize 
their certain prey ; they found only the bare rock, the empty 

(*) Glorious Recovery, p. 175. The French re-appear May 10th. 
( 2 ) Id., p. 179. 



238 THE VAUDOIS. 

castle, and hastened, in their rage, to follow the Yaudois along 
their mountain-path^ 1 ) 

Here, however, they were easily eluded by their active foe. 
The Yaudois kept upon the loftiest of the mountains, feeding 
on the foliage of the fir-trees and drinking the half -melted 
snow. Sometimes they leaped down in fierce forays upon the 
fertile valleys ; often they shot down the invaders from some 
lofty crag, or swept away the flocks of the Savoyard settlers. 
Still they hovered fondly over their native scenes, and linger- 
ed, with scarcely a hope in the future, above the torrents and 
the crags they had loved in youth. To their simple and ten- 
der hearts these last arduous days must have seemed the sad- 
dest and most cheerless of all. From their post on the mount- 
ains of Angrogna they might look down into the fairest of 
the Italian vales. They saw the softly swelling hills encircle 
the fertile fields ; the laughing torrent ; the budding groves 
of mulberry and chestnut ; the grateful gardens around their 
early homes ; the silent churches ; and the blossom - covered 
lawns. But all these they were to enjoy no more. An act- 
ive foe pursued them from peak to peak, and they must soon 
fly to their most secret caves. ( 2 ) 

But in a moment all was changed, and the Glorious Eeturn 
was accomplished by a sudden revolution. On the 21st of 
May, 1690, as Arnaud and his heroes lingered around Angro- 
gna, they learned that the Duke of Savoy had joined the alli- 
ance of England and Holland against France. The duke now 
needed the aid of all his subjects, and the heroic valor of the 
Yaudois showed that he had none so worthy as they. He 
sent a messenger to Arnaud, inviting him to join his service, 
with his followers, and granting permission to the Yaudois to 
return to their native valleys.Q Arnaud obeyed his sover- 
eign ; and his soldiers were as active and courageous in the 
war against the French as they had ever been in defense of 



(*) Glorious Kecovery, p. 180. 

( 2 ) Muston abounds in details of the incidents of the expedition, but 
adds little to the account of Arnaud, ii., p. 74. 

( 3 ) Id., ii., p. 76. 



A GLORIOUS RETURN. 239 

their native vales. Soon the exiled Yaudois heard of the hap- 
py change, and came in glad troops over the Alps to occupy 
the homes of their fathers. Xo hope of gain or prospect of 
advantage could detain the gentle race in foreign lands. They 
left their thriving plantations in Brandenburg, their farms in 
Germany, or their factories in England, and with psalms of 
triumph hastened to revive their apostolic Church in its ancient 
seat. Lucerna, San Martino, and Perouse were again filled 
with a rejoicing people ; and the lovely landscapes of the sa- 
cred vales shone in new beauty, the temples of an untarnished 
faith. 

Such was the Glorious Keturn. But for the valor of the 
eight hundred, the wisdom and piety of Henry Arnaud, and 
the counsels of the aged Janavel, the Yaudois might still have 
wandered in foreign lands, and their lovely vales have remain- 
ed in the possession of strangers. But they were now firmly 
seated in their ancient home, never to be driven from it again. 
The Jesuits and the Popes still plotted their ruin ; and when 
the war was over Yictor Amadeus, with his usual bad faith, 
revived the persecution in the valleys. In 1698, a Jesuit and 
a number of monks visited all the vales, and made their report 
to the Pope.Q In consequence, the duke issued a decree ex- 
pelling all the French Protestants from the country, and for- 
bidding the Yaudois from having any intercourse, on matters 
of religion, with the subjects of Louis XIY. Three thousand 
persons were driven from the valleys by this cruel edict. The 
various disabilities now imposed upon the Yaudois served to 
render their lives painful, and expose them to the penalties of 
the hostile courts. They were forbidden to exercise certain 
professions, to purchase property beyond certain limits, to set- 
tle out of their valleys even for trade, to oppose the conversion 
of their children to Romanism, or to make proselytes them- 
selves. They were held in a kind of bondage, and treated as 
an inferior race. It was a common practice with the priests 
of Turin to carry off the children of the Yaudois and educate 
them in the Pornish faith. In 1730, severe instructions were 

(*) Muston, ii. ? p. 109. 



240 TEE VAUDOIS. 

issued against the people of the valleys; and throughout the 
eighteenth century the Church of Rome labored by every art 
to extirpate its rival church upon the Alps. The Jesuits re- 
newed their activity ; the Yaudois were often imprisoned, and 
their pastors ill-treated. The jealous Popes looked with su- 
perstitious dread upon the gentle moderators of the blooming 
valleys. 

' Nor was this without reason ; for as the age advanced in 
liberality the Alpine Church became to Italy an example and 
a teacher. From Pra del Tor had descended, in the Mid- 
dle Ages, a band of Yaudois missionaries ; in the eighteenth 
century it was still the centre of advancing thought. With- 
in the circle of the Alps the Church flourished with singular 
vigor. Persecution failed to check its growth ; the churches 
multiplied ; the schools increased ; the people of the valleys 
were better educated than those of Turin or Pome. Poor, 
feeble, an isolated and hated race, shut out from the common 
privileges of their fellow-subjects, from colleges, schools, hos- 
pitals, and the liberal professions, the Yaudois were still a 
power whose influence was often felt where it was not seen. 
The people of Turin saw constantly before them the spectacle 
of a Church that never persecuted nor reviled ; of a race that 
steadily advanced in moral and intellectual vigor ; of a nation 
of heroes who had ever defended liberty of conscience when 
all Italy besides had bowed in servitude to Rome. The Yau- 
dois grew popular with the scholars of Sardinia, with the peo- 
ple, and even with the court. They were still oppressed by 
unjust laws ; yet toward the close of the century a Yaudois 
Church had sprung up at Turin, and the liberal ideas of the 
valleys were penetrating the North of Italy. The moderators 
of the Alps became the leaders of an intellectual movement 
that was destined to spread from Balsille to Tarento. 

Yet the only period of real freedom the Yaudois had ever 
known since the papal usurpations sprung from the conquests 
of the first Napoleon.Q The impulsive hero was touched by 
their history, listened to their complaints, and granted them 

(') Mustoii, ii., p. 308 et seq. 



NEW PERSECUTIONS. 241 

all they required. For the first time, perhaps, since the days 
of Hildebrand, a perfect religious freedom prevailed in the 
valleys, and the iron tyranny of Rome and the Jesuits was 
crushed by the offspring of revolutionary France. A centu- 
ry before, Louis XIV. had nearly secured the destruction of 
the Alpine Church ; in 1800 it sprung up into new vigor un- 
der the shelter of the French arms. The pastors of the val- 
leys returned Napoleon's favors with sincere gratitude, and 
lamented his final defeat as that of a friend. It is probable 
that the unsparing conqueror had no more truthful admirers 
than the pure and lofty spirits whom he had set free upon 
their mountains. 

With the restoration of 1814r-'15, Victor Emanuel IY. 
came to the throne of Sardinia, and the Vaudois once more 
sunk to the condition of a subjugated race, alien and oppress- 
ed. They were known to be advocates of freedom and ad- 
vance; the Pope and the Jesuits again ruled at Turin; the 
Church and State again united to destroy the Church of the 
mountains.Q From 1814 to 1848 the Yaudois suffered indig- 
nities and deprivations scarcely surpassed in the earlier perse- 
cutions. All the ancient oppressive laws were revived. They 
were forbidden to hold any civil office, to pursue their labors 
on Catholic festivals, to hold land beyond a certain limit, to 
make proselytes, or build new churches except in the least 
favorable locations, to marry into papist families, or to give, 
sell, or lend their Bibles to Catholics. Romish missions were 
established in their midst, and a convent and a church were 
built at La Tour to complete the conversion of the people. 
When Dr. Gilly visited the valleys in 1822 he was struck by 
the beauty of their landscape, the simplicity and purity of the 
people : he was touched and grieved to find that they still la- 
bored under a rule of persecution : and that liberty of con- 
science, for which they had ever sighed, was still denied them 
by unforgiving Eome. 

But the Church of the Alps was now to rise from its deso- 
lation, and to shine out with new lustre in the eyes of all Eu- 

0) Muston, ii. ? p. 349. 

16 



242 THE VAUBOIS. 

rope. The free principles it had always inculcated, the liber- 
ty of conscience it had ever defended, were become the ruling 
ideas of every cultivated Italian. Turin and Sardinia had 
learned to look with wonder, admiration, and remorse upon 
the lovely valleys they had so often desolated, and the inno- 
cent people they had so constantly tortured and oppressed. 
The Sardinian king, Charles Albert, stood at the head of the 
Italian reformers. He was resolved to give freedom to the 
Yaudois ; to atone, if possible, for the crimes of his ancestors ; 
to make some faint return to the people of the valleys for 
their long lesson of patience, resignation, and truth. Amidst 
the acclamations of his subjects, he prepared (1847) to extend 
freedom of conscience to the churches of the Alps. A patri- 
otic excitement arose in their favor. A petition was drawn 
up at Turin urging the king to enfranchise the Yaudois and 
the Jews. Its first signer was the poet, artist, and statesman, 
the Marquis D' Azeglio ; and his name was followed by a long 
list of professors, lawyers, physicians, and even liberal ecclesi- 
astics and priests. Cheers were given for the Yaudois at pub- 
lic dinners in Pignerol and Turin, and all Piedmont wept over 
their history and rejoiced in their approaching triumph. On 
the 17th of February, 1848, the royal decree was issued giving 
freedom to the valleys.Q 

It was received by the simple and generous Yaudois with 
a limitless gratitude. A thrill of joy ran over the beautiful 
vales, and Lucerna, San Martino, and Perouse resounded with 
hymns of thanksgiving upon the return of that stable freedom 
which had been ravished from them eight centuries ago. In 
every village there were processions of the young, with ban- 
ners and patriotic songs; the blue colors of renewed Italy 
shone on every breast ; the gentle race forgot all their inju- 
ries and their woes, to mingle freely with their Eomish breth- 
ren, and to celebrate their victory in unbounded love. At 
night the wonderful scenery of the valleys was set off by a 
general illumination. Pignerol glittered with light ; St. John 
and La Tour shone at the opening of the defiles ; far up, as- 

(*) Muston, ii. ; p. 391 et seq. 



TURIN DOES HONOR TO THE VAUDOIS. 243 

cending toward the Alps, every crag and cliff had its bonfire, 
and the gleam of a thousand lights startled the wild mount- 
ains, and flashed in caves and ravines where Janavel and Hen- 
ry Arnaud had once hid in perpetual gloom. The snow-clad 
peaks and the icy torrents glowed in the illumination of free- 
dom. But a still more remarkable spectacle was witnessed at 
Turin. There for three centuries the Jesuits had labored and 
waited for the extermination of the Vaudois. In the public 
square, amidst its splendid palaces, had died a long succession 
of martyrs, the victims of its priests and kings. In its dread- 
ful dungeons, noisome with disease, thousands of the people 
of the valleys had pined and wasted away. What unuttered 
woes had been borne in its prisons for freedom's sake no 
tongue could tell, no fancy picture. Its convents had been 
filled with the stolen children of the Yaudois ; its stony walls 
had heard the vain complaints of parents and brothers with- 
out relenting. From its gates had issued forth those dread- 
ful crusades, whose hosts of brigands, soldiers, priests, Inquisi- 
tors were so often let loose upon the valleys to do the work 
of fiends. From Turin had come the impalers of women, the 
murderers of children ; the Spaniards, who flung old men over 
beetling crags ; the Irish, who surpassed even the enormities 
of the Italians ; the Jesuits and Franciscans, who urged for- 
ward the labor of destruction ; the nobles and princes, the 
pillars of chivalry, who looked on and applauded crimes for 
which Dante could have found no fitting punishment amidst 
the deepest horrors of his pit. 

And now all Turin, repentant and humble, resolved to do 
honor to the Alpine Church. A day of rejoicing had been 
appointed for liberated Piedmont, and a deputation from the 
Yaudois was sent to the capital. . As they issued from the val- 
leys they were saluted everywhere with loud vivas for " our 
Yaudois brothers," for "liberty of conscience.'^ 1 ) The citi- 
zens of Turin received them with unbounded hospitality, and 
the gentle Yaudois took part in the grand procession : they 
were preceded by a group of young girls, clothed in white, 

O Muston, ii. ? p. 392. 



244 THE VAUDOIS. 

adorned with blue girdles, and each bearing a little banner. 
Six hundred persons composed the Yaudois deputation, the 
most noted in the stately pageant. To them, as a mark of ' 
especial honor, was assigned the first place at the head of 
the procession as it moved through the streets of Turin. 
The persecuted of a thousand years walked the leaders of 
Italian freemen. The city rang with cheers for the Yau- 
dois ; flowers were showered upon them from the balconies ; 
men rushed from the crowd to salute, to embrace the patient 
mountaineers ; even liberal priests cheered them as they went 
by; the women of Turin smiled upon the daughters of the 
valleys. Yet, as the Yaudois moved through the squares hal- 
lowed by the torments of their early martyrs, beside the pris- 
ons where their ancestors had died by thousands, the palaces 
where Jesuits and princes had often planned their total extir- 
pation, they were amazed at the startling contrast, and listen- 
ed with grateful hearts to the glad congratulations of the peo- 
ple of Turin.Q They breathed out a silent thanksgiving, and 
prayed that the blessing of Heaven might ever rest upon their 
pleasant native land. 

Their modest prayers have been fulfilled. The festival of 
their liberation was followed by a wave of revolution that 
swept over all Europe. The Jesuits and the propaganda were 
banished from Turin ; France became suddenly a republic ; 
the Pope was exiled from Rome, to be restored only by the 
French armies to his ancient tyranny ; and Italy was for a mo- 
ment free. If for a time the cloud of war rested over the val- 
leys, yet the victories of Napoleon and the swift triumph of 
Garibaldi have given freedom to the peninsula, and safety to 
the Alpine Church. To-day Lucerna, Perouse, and San Mar- 
tino shine forth in perpetual beauty. The torrents gleam 
through the sweet vales of Angrogna,( 2 ) and roar against the 
cliffs of Balsille. In Pra del Tor, the citadel of the Yaudois 



(^Mustoi^ii.jp. 393. Who would have said, wrote a Yaudois, that we 
would have seen all this ? 

( 2 ) Gilly, Narrative, p. 138, describes the scenery of Angrogna as un- 
matched in Italy or Switzerland. 



THE MODERATOR TRIUMPHS OVER THE POPE. 245 

has become a cultured field, aud the chestnut groves where 
Henry Arnaud and his pious soldiers celebrated their holy 
rites are still rich with abundant fruit ; the landscapes of Lu- 
cerna glow with the soft products of the Italian clime ; in the 
wilder valleys the avalanche leaps from the snow-clad mount- 
ains, the chamois feeds on his icy pastures, the eagle screams 
around the peaks of Guinevert. To-day the primitive Chris- 
tians assemble in peace in churches that were founded when 
ISTero began his persecutions, or when Constantine gave rest to 
the tormented world. The Yaudois moderator gathers around 
him his humble pastors in their sacred synods, as the elders of 
the Middle Ages assembled at Pra del Tor. The schools of 
the Yaudois, from which the Bible has never been excluded 
since the dawn of Christianity, flourish with new vigor ; their 
colleges no longer hide in the caverns of Angrogna. The 
long struggle of centuries has ended, and the gentle people of 
the valleys have found freedom to worship God. 

Thus the moderator of the Alps has triumphed over the 
persecuting Pope of Rome, and liberty of conscience reigns 
from the valleys to the Sicilian Straits. Yet one dark scene 
of tyranny still remains — one blot on the fair renown of Italy. 
In the City of Rome the Jesuits and the Pope still rule. Still 
they point with menacing gestures to the people of the val- 
leys ; still they would snatch the Bible from their schools, and 
crush their consciences with mediseval tyranny. In Rome 
alone persecution for religion's sake still continues; Rome 
alone, of all European cities, cherishes a shadow of the Inqui- 
sition^ 1 ) and still asserts its right to govern the minds of men 
by brutal force. Enthroned by foreign bayonets over a mur- 
muring people,( 2 ) the vindictive Pope proclaims his undying 
hostility against the wise and the good of every land. But 
should the Holy Father and the society of Loyola turn their 
eyes to the Yaudois Alps, they may read their doom graven 

(*) See a decree of the Inquisition (1841) directed against heresy in the 
Papal States with all its ancient severity. Italy in Transition, p. 460, Ap- 
pendix, with other documents. The Syllabus and the Canons still defend 
the use of force in producing religious unity. 

( 2 ) Until 1870. 



246 THE FAUDOIS. 

on each heaven-piercing peak. There may be seen a spectral 
company of the hallowed dead writing with shadowy lingers 
a legend on the rocks ; the tiny babe crushed beneath the sol- 
dier's heel ; the fair mother hewed to pieces on the snow ; the 
old man of ninety burned to ashes on the fatal pyre. They 
write, " Whoever shall harm one of these little ones, it were 
better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, 
and he were drowned in the depth of the sea !" 



THE HUGUENOTS. 

The barbaric dream of chivalry proved singularly attractive 
to the imaginative people of France. The strength and glory 
of the nation were wasted in endless wars. The same impulse 
that leads the Comanche to butcher the Sioux, or the King of 
the Guinea Coast to burn the villages of his neighbors, drove 
the French kings and nobles to tierce inroads upon Germa- 
ny and a constant rivalry with Spain. Glory was only to be 
won upon the battle-field ; he who fought was a noble ; the 
honest laborer was his inferior and his slave. To murder, to 
waste, and to destroy were the proper employments of kings 
and princes; while the Church of Rome aroused anew the 
worst elements of human nature by preaching a series of ruth- 
less crusades, and by its example of a general persecution. Q 

Chivalry, the offspring of barbarism and superstition, cul- 
minated in the person of Francis I. By historians Francis is 
usually called gallant, but his gallantry consisted only in an in- 
tense selfishness and an utter moral corruption. ( 2 ) He was 
the scourge of France, the destroyer of his people ; and if, in 
this respect, he was no worse than his contemporaries, Charles 
V., Henry TILL, and the Popes of Rome, he was more guilty, 
because more highly endowed. Mature had been singularly 
bountiful to the chief of the house of Talois. His form was 
tall and graceful ; his mind had been fed upon romance and 
song. He was a poet, the author of sweet and plaintive 

C) De Felice, Hist. Protestants in France ; D'Aubigne*, Eeformation in 
Europe, book ii., c. x. ; Martin, Hist. Fran., ix. See Gassier, Histoire de la 
Chevalerie Francaise, i., p. 277, for tbe cruel traits of chivalry ; so, too, i., p. 
360, for tbe origin of constables and marshals. 

( 2 ) For this period Smiles, The Huguenots, and White, Massacre of St. 
Bartholomew, may be consulted with advantage. Capefigue, Francois l er , 
enlarges on " cet esprit chevaleresque," etc.,i., p. 209. 



248 THE HUGUENOTS. 

verses ; a hero, longing to renew the exploits of Amadis and 
Charlemagne ; the friend of Leonardo da Yinci, the patron 
of Clement Marot.Q Yet, with all these softening impulses 
and tastes, Francis lived the life of a savage. At home in 
his splendid palace, the Lonvre, he was plunged in the coarse 
pleasures of a profligate court ; abroad he rushed like a mad- 
man from battle-field to battle-field, never happy unless sur- 
rounded by carnage. Under the rule of its chivalric king 
France knew every woe of which nations are capable. Whole 
districts were desolated by the tax-gatherer, the conscription, 
the invasion of the enemy, the hand of persecution. Famine, 
disease, poverty, bloodshed, were the gifts of Francis to his 
people ; and while the king and his mistresses were borne in 
pomp from banquet to banquet beneath canopies of velvet 
seamed with gold, the mothers of Languedoc saw their chil- 
dren die of hunger in once prosperous towns, and the holy men 
and women of Merindol were butchered by thousands to soothe 
the venal bigotry of their master.Q It is sometimes said that 
the crimes of kings and popes, like Leo X., Henry YIIL, and 
Francis, are to be palliated by the general barbarism of their 
age ; it might be easily shown that they were .usually the most 
vicious and corrupt of their contemporaries. In France were 
thousands of wise, pure, honorable, and gifted men, well fitted 
to rule a nation, who saw with shame and horror the cruelties 
and the vices of the unhappy Francis and his persecuting 
court. 

In the dawn of this disastrous reign the Huguenots first ap- 
pear. They were the direct offspring of the Bible. ( 3 ) As the 
sacred volume, multiplied by the printing-presses of Germany, 
first made its way into France, it was received as a new reve- 
lation. Before Luther had published his theses it is said that 
there were Protestants at Paris, and wherever the Bible came 
it was certain to found a church. But it was chiefly among 
the men of labor and of thought that its teachings were ever 

(*) Schmidt, Geschicbte von Frankreich, ii., p. 293, aud ii., p. 693, note : 
" Le protecteur de Marot en est souvent l'heureux rival." 

( 2 ) De Felice, p. 32 ; White, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 13. 
( 8 ) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 23. 



EMINENT HUGUENOTS. 249 

welcome. Labor, flying from the decaying cities of Italy and 
the disturbed dominions of Charles V., had found a new home 
in many of the towns of France ; accomplished workmen in 
silk and linen, iron or clay, had stimulated the prosperity of 
Lyons and Tours, Saintes and Meaux ; painters, sculptors, ar- 
chitects, and poets had sprung up amidst the barbarism of 
chivalry. Paris was as renowned for its painters as for its 
goldsmiths ; and the College of France spread liberal learning 
among the ambitious students of the day. To the cultivated 
artisan and the classical scholar the gross corruptions of the 
Church, and the open vices of monks and priests, were singu- 
larly odious ; for the one had learned the charm of virtue by 
practicing a regular life, the other by a study of Socrates and 
Cicero. When, therefore, the Bible, in its modern translation, 
was laid before the people, a wonderful religious revolution 
swept over France. Nearly the whole working-class became 
Protestants. (*) The great manufacturing towns were convert- 
ed at once from Romanism to the faith of St. Paul. Almost 
every eminent artisan or inventor was a Huguenot. Stephen, 
the famous printer ; Palissy, the chief of potters ; the first 
French sculptor, Goujon ; the great surgeon Pare, and a throng 
of their renowned companions, shrunk from the mass as idola- 
trous, and lived by the precepts of the Bible.( 2 ) The profess- 
ors of the College of France and the ablest of living scholars 
adopted the principles of reform. The impulse spread to no- 
bles and princes. The house of Bourbon and of Navarre were 
nearly all Huguenots. Marguerite, the sister of Francis, be- 
came the chief support of the Reformers, and the king himself 
seemed for a moment touched and softened by the sacred lan- 
guage of inspiration. The Bible ruled over the rejoicing 

( x ) Archives Curieuses, l er se"r., vol. ii., p. 459, La Rebaine de Lyon, a con- 
temporary tract, denounces the new faith as the cause of the independent 
spirit of the workmen of Lyons. Until now they had obeyed their masters 
(1529). " Mais, depuis la veniie de ceste faulce secte nouvellement non trou- 
v6e mais renouvelle'e de ces mauldictz Vauldoys et Chaignartz venans de 
septentrion, wide omne malum et iniquitas, le peuple a prinse une elevation et 
malice," etc. The people began to doubt the divine right of their princes 
to rule. ( 2 ) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 37. 



250 THE HUGUENOTS. 

FreDch. Of the wonderful power of this wide reform it is 
impossible to speak without enthusiasm. Swiftly there spread 
over the manufacturing towns of France a reign of saintly pu- 
rity. Men once more shrunk from vice and clung to virtue. 
The gross habits of the Middle Ages were thrown aside ; the 
taverns and theatres were deserted, the morris - dancers and 
jongleurs no longer amused ; the rude dissipation of the peas- 
antry, the licentious fetes of priests and nobles, awakened only 
disgust; but in every village prayer-meetings were held, and 
the Bible was studied by throngs of eager students, who, for the 
first time, were now enabled to listen to the voice of inspiration. 
The Reformation began, it is said, at Meaux, a small manu- 
facturing town on the borders of Flanders, which had learned 
from its Flemish neighbor industry and independence.^) Its 
people had been coarse and rude, its priests vicious, indolent, 
and dull, and the little town had found its chief recreation 
in drunkenness and barbarous license. Its inhabitants were 
wool - carders, fullers, cloth - makers, and mechanics, living by 
the product of their daily labor, and grasping eagerly at ev- 
ery uncultivated pleasure. Jacques Lef evre, the translator of 
the Bible into French, a man of nearly seventy, and the young 
and brilliant Farel,( 2 ) his faithful associate, preached to the 
working-men of Meaux and distributed among them copies 
of the Gospels. At once the mass was deserted, the priest 
contemned, and eager throngs listened to the daring mission- 
aries who ventured to unfold the long-forgotten truth.( 3 ) A 
swift and graceful transformation passed over the busy town. 
No profane word was any longer uttered, no ribaldry nor 
coarse jests were heard. Drunkenness and disorder disap- 
peared ; vice hid in the monastery or the cloister. In every 
factory the Gospels were read as a message from above, and 
the voice of prayer and thanksgiving mingled with the clam- 
or of the shuttle and the clash of the anvil. The rude and 
boisterous artisans were converted into refined and gentle be- 

C) De Felice, p. 19. 

( 2 ) Said Farel : " Je viens prouver la vente" de mes doctrines, et je le ferai 
au peril de ma vie." See Histoire Geneve, par A. Shoarel, ii., p. 89. 

( 3 ) See De Felice, p. 19. 



PALISSY THE POTTER. 251 

He vers, ever seeking for the pure and the true ; and the sud- 
den impulse toward a higher life awakened at Means by the 
teachings of Farel and Lefevre stirred, like an electric shock, 
every portion of diseased and decaying France. A moment 
of regeneration seemed near, a season of wonderful advance. 

At a later period Palissy, the potter, has left a pleasing 
account of a similar transformation. In the busy town of 
Saintes, where he was pursuing with incredible toil and self- 
denial one of the chief secrets of his art, Palissy became the 
founder of a church. Too poor to purchase a copy of the Bi- 
ble, he learned its contents by heart, and every Sunday morn- 
ing exhorted or instructed nine or ten of his fellow - towns- 
men who assembled in secret to hear the Word of God. The 
little congregation soon grew in numbers.Q For some time 
they met at midnight, and hid from persecution. At length 
the purity of their lives and the earnestness of their faith won 
the respect of the people of Saintes ; a pastor was procured ; 
the people crowded to the Protestant assembly ; a revival 
spread over the town, and a sudden reform in morals made 
Saintes a haven of rest and peace. Coarse plays and dances, 
extravagance in dress and license in living, scandal, quarrels, 
and lawsuits, says Palissy, had almost wholly passed away. In- 
stead of profane language and idle jesting were heard only 
psalms, prayers, and spiritual songs. ( 2 ) The religion ruled 
over the happy town, and even the priests and monks, stirred 
by the general impulse, began to pray and preach with honest 
fervor, and to emulate the purity of the zealous reformers. 
A gentle harmony prevailed between the rival churches ; for 
the moment the evil passions of men were charmed into re- 
pose. Then, adds Palissy, might be seen, on Sundays, bands 
of work-people walking cheerfully in the meadows, groves, 
and fields, singing spiritual songs together, or reading to one 
another from the sacred volumes ; vounp; girls and maidens 
chanting hymns beneath the pleasant shade ; boys, with their 
teachers, full of a steadfast purpose to live a noble life. The 

( : ) Palissy. (Euvres Completes, Recepte Veritable, p. 103. 
( 2 ) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 39-42. 



252 THE HUGUENOTS. 

very countenances of the people, he asserts, were changed ; 
the coarse lines of sensuality had been swept away, and from 
every face shone only benevolence and truth. 

The picture of the reformed village, drawn by the honest 
pen of the gentle artisan, reads like an idyllic dr*eam amidst 
the dreadful story of the reign of the chivalric Francis. It 
seems scarcely more probable than Livy's narrative of the 
Golden Age of Numa, or Homer's legend of the gentle Phsea- 
cians. Yet it was no doubt true. In many towns and cities 
of martial France similar scenes were witnessed. More than 
two thousand churches sprung up in the apparently ungenial 
soil. The early Huguenots were noted for their austere virt- 
ues, their truthfulness, their love of peace. They lived to- 
gether, a happy brotherhood, joined in a common faith, a sim- 
ilar purity of life. Men trusted the word of a Huguenot 
when the oath of the Catholic noble awakened only distrust. 
They brought honesty into commerce, and the domestic virt- 
ues into every home. They softened their enemies by a tol- 
erant patience ; they strove to convert rather than to destroy ; 
their brilliant leaders, adorned by rare talents and eminent 
virtues, attracted the admiration of the age ; and it seemed 
possible that the tide of reform might sweep unchecked over 
France, subdue by its gentleness the hostility of the Gallican 
Church, and restrain, with a mighty force, the barbarous in- 
stincts of the feudal princes and the impulsive king. 

But France was not permitted to reform itself. It was the 
slave of an Italian master and of a throng of Italian priests. 
From their distant thrones a series of cruel and vicious Popes 
awoke the fires of discord in the progressive nation, denounced 
the gentle Huguenots as the enemies of Heaven, and demand- 
ed their extirpation.^) The French priests, roused to mad- 
ness by the intrigues of Borne, began the fatal labor of perse- 
cution ; the uncultivated nobles and the immoral court yielded 
to the fierce anathemas of the Italian potentate ; robbers and 

(') The Romish Church has always advocated the extirpation of heresy, 
where it can be accomplished with safety to itself. De Castro, De Justa 
Hseret. Punitione, 1547, p. 119 : "Jure divino obligautur eos extirpare, si 
absque majori iucommodo possint." So " fides illis data servanda non sit." 



REFORMERS OUTLAWED. 253 

assassins were let loose upon the peaceful congregations of re- 
formers ; the horrors inflicted by the popish Inquisitors awoke 
retaliation, and the dawning hope of France was forever lost 
in the unexampled terrors of its religious wars. 

The Pope gave the signal for a perpetual St. Bartholo- 
mew's. Francis obeyed, perhaps reluctantly, the Italian priest. 
A general crusade began against all those flourishing Protest- 
ant communities where sanctifled labor had lately borne Hes- 
perian fruit. In 1525, Clement VII. sanctioned or created the 
French Inquisition, endowing it with " apostolical authority " 
to try and condemn heretics. A series of royal edicts follow- 
ed, enjoining the public officials to extirpate the reformers ; 
and in every part of France it became the favorite pastime 
for the idle and the dissolute to plunder the houses of the 
Huguenots, burn their factories, desolate their homes by 
dreadful atrocities, and bind them with malevolent exulta- 
tion to the stake.Q At the command, by the instigation of 
Clement, Paul, Julius, Pius, the successors of St. Peter, every 
Romanist in France was made an assassin, every faithful ad- 
herent of the Pope was enjoined to rob or murder an unof- 
fending neighbor.Q The era of reform, which had lately 
seemed so near, vanished before the malevolent interference 
of the Italians ; the commands of Rome checked the advan- 
cing tide of civilization. Bands of plunderers, blasphemers, 
ravish ers, murderers, obeyed the Holy Father, and sprung upon 
the Protestant communities. No more was heard the chant of 
holy songs on Sundays in the pleasant groves ; no longer fair 
young girls made sacred music in the forest; no more the 
manly youth planned lives of generous purpose. The austere, 
benevolent Huguenot was cut down at his forge or his shut- 
tle ; his wife and children became the victims of the papal 
soldiers ; every village rang with blasphemy and the jests of 

(*) D'Aubignd, Eef. in Europe, i., p. 552-557. Francis was hired by the 
clergy to extirpate the Huguenots. See J. Simon, La Liberty de Con- 
science, p. 128 et seq., for the cruelties of the king. 

( 2 ) Relations des Arnbassadeurs V^nitieus, Doc. Ined., Hist. France, i., p. 
520 : " Fu introdotta questa peste in Francia," etc. It was a horrible poi- 
son the Catholics wished to expel. 



254 THE HUGUENOTS. 

demons ; every enormity was perpetrated in obedience to the 
orders of the Pope. 

Palissy has described, with simple truthfulness, the effects 
of the papal interference upon his once prosperous church at 
Saintes. The town had been invaded by a band of papal per- 
secutors. " The very thought of those evil days," he exclaims. 
; * fills my mind with horror." 

To avoid the spectacle of the robberies, murders, and vari- 
ous crimes perpetrated in the town, he concealed himself for 
two months in his own house. During all this long period 
the work of persecution went on. until all the reformed had 
fled from the hapless neighborhood. It seemed to Palissy as 
if Satan had broken loose, and raging demons had suddenly 
taken possession of Saintes. "Where lately had been heard 
only psalms and spiritual songs and exhortations to a holy 
life, now echoed on every side abominable language, dissolute 
ballads, profanity, and execrations. Led by their priests. " a 
band of imps," he says, issued from a neighboring castle, en- 
tered the town with drawn swords, and shouted. " Where are 
the heretics I We will cut their throats at once." They rush- 
ed from house to house, robbing and murdering : they utter- 
ed blasphemies against both God and man.(' i Palissy hiinself 
soon after escaped to Paris. Here he was employed for many 
years by Catherine de' Medici and her children; was at last 
sent to the Bastile for heresy, and by dying in prison escaped 
the stake. His narrative of the events of Saintes. of the hor- 
rors of the papal persecution, may be accepted as an accurate 
picture of what happened in every Protestant village or town 
in France by the direct command of the Pope at Rome. 

There now began a remarkable contest between the Rom- 
ish Church and the Bible — between the printers and the 
Popes.' : i For many centuries the Scriptures had been hid- 
den in a dead language, guarded by the anathemas of the 

(*) Smiles. Huguenots, pp. 44. 45. 

( 2 ) Relat.. Anib. Yen.. Doc. Ined.. ii..p. 139. Correro thinks the heresies 
might have been repressed if Francis had "been more active. Yet it was 
during this period that Montaigne was writing his essay upon " Cruelty/' 
and teaching wisdom from history. 



THE BIBLE. 255 

priests from the public eye, and so costly in manuscript form 
as to be accessible only to the wealthy. A Bible cost as 
much as a landed estate ; the greatest universities, the richest 
monasteries, could scarcely purchase a single copy. Its lan- 
guage and its doctrines had long been forgotten by the peo- 
ple, and in their place the intellect of the Middle Ages had 
been fed upon extravagant legends and monkish visions, the 
fancies of idle priests, the fables of the unscrupulous. The 
wonders worked by a favorite image, the virtues of a relic, 
the dreams -of a dull abbot or a fanatical monk, had supplant- 
ed the modest teachings of Peter and the narrative of Luke. 
Men saw before them only the imposing fabric of the Church 
of Rome, claiming supremacy over the conscience and the 
reason, pardoning sins, determining doctrines, and had long 
ceased to remember that there was a Redeemer, a Bible, even 
a God. A practical atheism followed. The Pope was often 
a skeptic, except as to his own right to rule. The Church and 
the monasteries teemed with the vices depicted by Rabelais 
and Erasmus. Then, in the close of the fifteenth century, a 
flood of light was poured upon mankind. The new art of 
printing sprung into sudden maturity, and great numbers of 
Bibles were scattered among the people. They were sought 
for with an avidity, studied with an eagerness, received with 
an undoubting faith, such as no later age has witnessed. Ar- 
rayed in the charm of entrancing novelty, the simple story of 
the Gospels and the noble morals of the epistles, translated for 
the first time into the common dialects, descended as if newly 
written by the pen of angels upon the minds of men. 

Every honest intellect was at once struck with the strange 
discrepancy between the teaching of the sacred volume and 
that of the Church of Rome.Q No religion, indeed, seemed 
less consistent with itself than that of mediaeval Romanism. 

(*) To the sellers of indulgences the New Testament was particularly 
odious. It stopped their trade. So Lyndesay's pardoner or indulgence- 
seller exclaims : 

"I give to the devill with gude intent 
This unsell, wickit New Testament, 
With thame that it translaitit." 

Satyre of the Three Estates. 



256 THE HUGUENOTS. 

The Mohammedan of the fifteenth century still clung with 
tenacity to the minute requirements of the Koran ; the Jew 
obeyed in every particular the injunctions of the Decalogue; 
the Greeks and Eomans had suffered few alterations in the 
rituals of Jupiter and Diana. But it was found, upon the 
slightest inspection, that there was no authority for the Kom- 
ish innovations in any portion of the Scriptures. There was 
no purgatory, no mass, no papal supremacy, no monasteries, 
no relics working miracles, no images, no indulgences to be 
found in the book that contained the teachings of Christ and 
his apostles. The inference was at once everywhere drawn 
that the theories of the Roman Church were founded upon 
imposture; and when, at the same time, the shameless lives of 
its priests and Popes were brought before the public eye by 
satirists and preachers, its gross corruption was believed to be 
the necessary result of its want of truthfulness; its cruelty 
and violence seemed the offspring of its unhallowed sensuality 
and pride. The Bible alone could now satisfy the active in- 
tellect of France ; the Bible awoke anew the simple Church of 
the apostolic age. 

To the Bible the Popes at once declared a deathless hostil- 
ity. To read the Scriptures was in their eyes the grossest of 
crimes; for they confessed by their acts that he who read 
must cease to be a Komanist.Q Not murder, robbery, nor 
any other offense was punished with such dreadful severity.( 2 ) 
The tongues of the gentle criminals were usually cut out; 
they were racked until their limbs parted; they were then 
forced to mount a cart, and were jolted over rough streets, in 
agony, to the stake. Here they were burned amidst the jeers 
of the priests and the populace. Yet the Bible sustained 
them in their hour of trial, and they died ever with hymns of 
exultation. Great wars were undertaken to drive the sacred 
volume from schools and colleges. The Inquisition was in- 

(*) Said Paul IV. : " A heretic never repents ; it is an evil for which there 
is no remedy but fire." 

( 2 ) Said Montaigne, Essay on Cruelty: "I live in a time abounding in 
examples of this vice j we see nothing in ancient histories more extreme 
than what we meet with every day." 



BIBLES BURNED. 257 

vested with new terrors, and was forced upon France and 
Holland by papal armies. The Jesuits were everywhere dis- 
tinguished by their hatred for the Bible. In the Netherlands 
they led the persecutions of Alva and Philip II. ; they re- 
joiced with a dreadful joy when Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent, 
the fairest cities of the working-men, were reduced to pauper- 
ism and ruin by the Spanish arms ; for the Bible had perished 
with its defenders. " There are above forty thousand Prot- 
estants in this town," wrote Sir Thomas Gresham from Ant- 
werp in 1666, " which will die rather than that the Word of 
God shall be put to silence." A few years later their heroic 
resolution had been fulfilled : they had nearly all perished by 
famine, disease, and the sword of Alva. 

To burn Bibles was the favorite employment of zealous 
Catholics. Wherever they were found the heretical volumes 
were destroyed by active Inquisitors, and thousands of Bibles 
and Testaments perished in every part of Prance. Yet the 
fertile press soon renewed the abundant fruit, and the skillful 
printers of Germany and Switzerland poured forth an inces- 
sant stream of French, Dutch, and English Bibles, besides an 
infinite number of tracts and treatises by eminent reformers. 
The demand for these books could never be sufficiently sap- 
plied. At Nuremberg, Mentz, and Strasburg there was an 
eager struggle for Luther's smallest pamphlets. Of his cate- 
chism one hundred thousand were sold. The sheets of his 
tracts, often wet from the press, were hidden under the pur- 
chasers' cloaks and passed from shop to shop. The most 
hated and the most feared of all the agents of reform, in this 
remarkable period, by priest and Pope, was the humble col- 
porteur or Bible-seller. Laden with his little pack of Bibles, 
Testaments, and Protestant treatises, the godly merchant made 
his way from Antwerp or Geneva into the heart of France, 
and, beneath the hot summer sun or in the snows of winter, 
pursued with patient toil his dangerous traffic^ 1 ) He knew 

O De Felice, p. 73. Reading the Bible to a congregation unauthorized 
by law is still a criminal offense in France, or was so in 1857. See M. Jules 
Simon's La Liberte' de Conscience, p. 27. His treatise may be read with 
instruction. 

17 



258 THE HUGUENOTS. 

that if detected he must die ; he felt that the keen eyes of In- 
quisitors and priests were everywhere watching for his com- 
ing. Yet, often disguised as a peddler of ribbons and trinkets, 
he made his way into the castles of the nobles or the homes 
of the working - men, and cautiously exposed his forbidden 
wares. They were bought with eagerness, and read by noble 
and peasant. But not seldom the daring missionary was dis- 
covered and punished ; his little stock of Bibles was dragged 
forth and burned by rejoicing priests, and the humble Bible- 
seller was himself sacrificed, in fearful tortures, to the dread- 
ful deity at Home. 

Between the printers and the Popes the war now began that 
has never ceased. The clank of the printing-press had to the 
ears of the Italian priesthood an ominous sound. " We must 
destroy printing," said an English vicar, " or it will destroy 
us." The Sorbonne of Paris denounced the printers in 1534, 
and burned twenty of them within six months, and one wom- 
an. A printer of the Rue Saint Jacques was condemned for 
publishing Luther's works ; a book-seller was burned for hav- 
ing sold them. At last the Sorbonne, the council of the papal 
faction, in 1535, obtained a decree from the king for the total 
suppression of printing. (*) 

Robert Stephens was one of the most eminent printers and 
scholars of the age. From his accurate press at Paris had is- 
sued Latin Bibles and Testaments of singular excellence and 
beauty. But he was a Huguenot, and even the favor and pro- 
tection of the king and the court could not shield him from 
the rage of the Sorbonne. It was discovered that in the notes 
to his Latin Bible of 1545 he had introduced heretical doc- 
trines. He was prosecuted by the Faculty of Theology, and 
fled from France to escape the stake. His contemporary, the 
poet, printer, and scholar, Dolet, was burned for atheism in 
1546. Yet the bold printers in Protestant Geneva, Germany, 



( x ) A. F. Didot, Paris Guide. " C'est ainsi," says Didot, a good authority, 
" que traitait l'imprimerie celui qu'on a voulu surnommer le Pere, ou le Ee- 
staurateur des Lettres," p. 296. The French are slowly discovering the ab- 
surdity of their received histories. 



THE PRINTERS AND THE POPES. 259 

and the Low Countries defied the rage of Popes and Inquis- 
itors, and still poured forth an increasing tide of Protestant 
tracts and Bibles. The press waged a ruthless war upon the 
Antichrist at Rome. It founded the republic of Holland, the 
central fount of modern freedom ; it reformed England and 
the North. It filled the common schools with Bibles, and in- 
structed nations in the humanizing lessons of history. From 
age to age it has never ceased to inflict deadly wounds upon 
the papacy ; until at length even Italy and Spain have been 
rescued from the grasp of the Inquisition and the Jesuits, and 
have proclaimed the freedom of the press. In the city of 
Rome alone, under the tyranny of an infallible pope, the print- 
er lay chained at the mercy of his ancient adversary until a 
recent period : from the dominions of Pius IX. the Protestant 
Bible, the source of modern civilization, was excluded by pen- 
alties scarcely less severe than those imposed by Pius Y. And 
as once more the Italian priests prepare to renew their war- 
fare against the printing-press and the Bible in the cities of 
free America, they will encounter, though with new arts and 
new arms, their successful adversary of the Old World. The 
printer once more defies the Pope. He points to the ashes of 
his martyrs, scattered in the waters of the Seine or the Scheldt 
in the sixteenth century ; to the prisons of Bologna or of 
Rome, so lately filled with the dying advocates of a free press 
in the nineteenth ; to the crimes of Pius IX., no less than 
those of Pius Y., as his gage of battle.Q 

More than thirty years of ceaseless persecution, filled with 
scenes of horror, oi flourishing seats of industry sacked and 
blighted, of holy men and women martyred with incredible 
sufferings, of dreadful atrocities perpetrated in every town 
and village by the emissaries of the Popes, had passed over 
the patient Huguenots before they resolved to take up arms 
in self-defense. Their gentle pastors, with persistent magna- 

C) The present Pope began his reign by promising a free press and lib- 
eral reforms to his people. He violated all his promises; and there is no 
existing government that has shown such excessive severity to its polit- 
ical opponents as that of Pius IX. See Facts and Figures from Italy, and 
Italy in Transition. 



260 THE HUGUENOTS. 

nimity, inculcated theories of non-resistance. Calvin himself, 
rigid and severe, still urged upon them obedience to their 
merciless kings. He was content to meet the savage barba- 
rism of the Inquisition with spiritual arms. From his strong- 
hold at Geneva he organized his Bible societies, and poured 
an incessant stream of reformed literature over every part of 
France. He cheered the martyrs with austere exhortations ; 
his Bible-sellers were seen in every secluded path and by-way, 
stealing with fearless faith from congregation to congrega- 
tion ; his presses at Geneva were never idle ; his " Institutes " 
were scattered widely over his native land. During this pe- 
riod of suffering, the Huguenots continued to increase in num- 
bers. Yet their congregations were often forced to meet in 
caves and forests, and to chant in subdued tones their sacred 
songs, lest their persecutors might break in upon them with 
tire and sword. Often the pious assembly was discovered in 
its most secret retreat, and men, women, and children were 
massacred by hordes of priests and brigands. 

At Meaux, the birthplace of reform, fourteen persons were 
burned alive in the market-place. In the South of France two 
Protestant towns, Cabrieres and Merindol, were razed to the 
ground : every house was destroyed, and the unoffending peo- 
ple were murdered in the streets. Four or five hundred 
women and children, who had taken refuge in a church, were 
butchered at once ; twenty-five women, who had hidden in a 
cave, were smothered by a fire kindled at its entrance by the 
papal legate. At Paris, on the night of September 4th, 1537, 
a congregation of Protestants were gathered in secret at a 
private house in the suburbs. Q Many of them were refined 
and pious men and women from the cultivated classes of so- 
ciety ; some were noble and connected with the court. But, 
united by a common piety, they celebrated the communion 
and listened to the exhortations of a faithful pastor.( 2 ) They 



C) White, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 40-43. 

( 2 ) The Huguenots fled from Paris in great numbers. The streets re- 
sounded with the cry of the ban proclaimed against them. J. Simon, La 
Liberie' de Conscience, p. 131. 



PHILIPPA DE LTJNZ. 261 

were startled by the cry, outside the door, of "Death to the 
Lutherans!" A wild mob of papists surrounded the house 
and besieged all night the terrified women, who were guarded 
alone by the swords of the gentlemen who attended them. 
In the morning the police arrested the whole Huguenot con- 
gregation and dragged them through the streets to the filthy 
dungeons of the Chatelet, where they had room neither to lie 
nor sit down. By the strict law their lives were forfeited. 
They were offered pardon if they would go to mass. But 
not one consented. A long and terrible imprisonment passed 
away before they were brought to trial. Among the captives, 
the fate of Philippa de Lunz — a refined and high-bred wom- 
an, only twenty-two years old, a widow, possessed of wealth 
and influence — is singularly illustrative of the papal theories. 
She was examined, and refused to recant. She was next led 
out for execution. In the gay city of Paris, in September, 
1558, a throng of papists assembled around a pile of fagots in 
the Place Maubert, dancing, singing, and calling for the vic- 
tims. The king, it is said, looked on from a distance ; the 
courtiers were not far off ; the priests were, no doubt, all pres- 
ent. At length a cart drove into the square, on which were 
seen Philippa and two Huguenot companions. Their tongues 
had already been cut out. But Philippa had laid aside her 
widow's weeds, and was dressed in her best attire. For she 
said, on leaving prison, "Why should not I rejoice? I am 
going to meet my husband." 

She witnessed the horrible convulsions of her two friends 
as they expired amidst the flames. She was lost in fervent 
prayer. The executioners roughly seized her, tore off her 
outer dress, and held her, with her head downward, in the fire. 
Her feet had already been burned off. She was then stran- 
gled, and her great soul escaped to heaven.Q 

Several others of the prisoners were executed. But their 
fate now awakened the attention of Europe. Calvin wrote to 
the survivors a letter of encouragement ; at his entreaty the 
princes of Germany interceded for them. The younger prison- 

C) White, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 43. 



262 THE HUGUENOTS. 

ers were carried to monasteries, from whence they were after- 
ward allowed to escape ; others were pardoned upon making 
an apparent recantation; and it is possible that even the 
French king and court were satisfied with the woes already 
inflicted upon the pious congregation of Paris. But the Pope 
was enraged at the lenity shown to the Huguenots, and de- 
nounced the faint trace of toleration on the part of the king. 
He complained, he remonstrated. He was discontented be- 
cause every prisoner had not been hung with his head down- 
ward in the flames, and strangled, like Philippa de Lunz.Q 

I have sketched the fate of the Protestants of Paris as an 
illustration of the Pom an doctrine of employing force in pre- 
serving religious unity. The Popes and the Italian priests 
still defend that theory of persecution by which Philippa de 
Lunz was strangled ; by which every country of Europe has 
been filled with woe ; by which, if honestly accepted, every 
devout Poman Catholic might be converted into an assassin.( a ) 

Silenced and overpowered, their congregations broken up, 
their pastors driven from France, the Huguenots still express- 
ed their religious impulses by a singular expedient. Music 
came to their aid. Clement Marot translated the Psalms of 
David into French verse, and soon the inspired songs of the 
Jewish king were chanted in every city of the realm. They 
resounded in plaintive melodies from the caves and forests 
where the Huguenots still ventured to assemble ; they made 
their way into the palace and the castle ; and Francis, Henry 
II., Catherine de' Medici, and Henry of Navarre, had each a 
favorite psalm. Catherine, with some propriety, selected " O 
Lord, rebuke me not ;" Diana of Poitiers, the mistress of Hen- 
ry II., delighted in the De Profundis. The Huguenots sung 
the Psalms as a substitute for divine worship ; and often, as 
throngs of Parisians were walking on summer evenings in the 
pleasure-grounds of Pre aux Clercs, some daring reformer 



(*) Laurent, Le Catholicisme et la Religion de l'Avenir,Paris, 1869, p. 577 
et seq. f shows that the Holy Office is still defended by the Romish bishops. 

( 2 ) The Syllabus still asserts that heresy must be repressed by force. 
The infallible Pope still wields the sword of persecution. 



CATHERINE DW MEDICI. 263 

would strike the key-note of a psalm of Marot, and the strain, 
caught up by innumerable voices, would swell over the gay as- 
semblage. The King and Queen of Navarre often went to the 
fashionable walk to hear the singing. But the priests at length 
procured an edict forbidding the practice, and the voice of sacred 
melody was finally hushed in the horrors of St. Bartholomew. 

King Francis, the chivalric, died of his own excesses ; his 
son, Henry II., succeeded, the husband of Catherine de' Medici. 
He was even more vicious and cruel than his father ; he per- 
secuted with Italian severity; he died amidst the thanksgiv- 
ings of the Huguenots, pierced by the lance of a rival knight, 
at a magnificent tourney. His death made way for the rule 
of his widow, Catherine de' Medici, and their three miserable 
sons. Nor can one reflect without a shudder of disgust upon 
that wretched group of depraved men and more monstrous 
women into whose hands now fell the destiny of the Hugue- 
nots and of fair and progressive France. Touched by the 
genial impulse of reform, filled with a brilliant generation of 
poets, scholars, accomplished artisans, and gifted statesmen, 
such as the world has seldom known, the unhappy realm was 
checked in the moment of its advance by the follies and the 
crimes of Catherine, the Popes, and the Guises. Rome ruled 
at Paris, and in the peaceful and holy communities described 
by Palissy and Beza was soon aroused a dreadful discord that 
ended in their destruction. The workman fled from his forge 
or his loom to die upon the battle-field ; the scholar, the mu- 
sician, and the poet carried the fruits of their genius to foreign 
lands ; the Italian prelate, with malevolent touch, blighted the 
dawning civilization of France.Q 

Catherine de' Medici led the revelries, the fashions, and 
the politics of the age. Her youth had been singularly un- 
fortunate.^) No friendly voice, no fond or tender counsels, 

(*) A Romish view of the persecution of the Huguenots is given by De 
Sauclieres, Coup d'CEil sur l'Histoire du Calvinisme en France (1844). This 
author palliates the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, and exults over the Rev- 
ocation. 

( 2 ) Vita di Caterina de' Medici, Alberi, softens the portrait of Catherine : 
" La gran fignra de Caterina domina intera un' epoca importantissima," etc. 



264 THE HUGUENOTS. 

had awakened in her cold heart a trace of filial or maternal 
love. Her father, Lorenzo de' Medici, had deserved by his 
vices the miseries he endured ; her mother was no less unhap- 
py ; and Catherine, the descendant of the wealthiest mercan- 
tile house in Europe, was born penniless and a child of evil 
omen. It was foretold of her at her birth that she would 
bring destruction to the city where she was born ; the towns- 
people of Florence would have exposed the infant in a basket 
to the balls of their enemies. But she was preserved alive, 
was shut up in a convent, and in the school of Macchiavelli 
and of Rome learned dissimulation and self-control. Her un- 
cle became Pope ; and Francis I., anxious to win the support 
of Clement, married his son Henry to the portionless orphan, 
then a girl of fourteen. But misfortune still followed the 
child of evil omen. The Pope, her uncle, soon died ; Francis 
reaped no benefit from the hasty marriage; and Catherine 
came into the family of Yalois only to be neglected by her 
husband for Diana of Poitiers, and to be contemned by her 
regal relatives as the impoverished descendant of a race of 
merchants. 

For many years she lived powerless and obscure, the nom- 
inal wife of a depraved king.Q Yet she was singularly beau- 
tiful. Her brilliant complexion, her large and lustrous eyes, 
the inheritance of the Medicean family, her graceful form, her 
hand and arm that no painter or sculptor could imitate, were 
set off by manners so soft and engaging as to win the esteem 
even of her foes. Few, left her presence without being charm- 
ed by that graceful courtesy which had descended to her from 
Lorenzo the Magnificent; few could believe that her placid 
countenance concealed the passions, the resentments, the un- 
sparing malice of the most ambitious of women. From Lo- 
renzo Catherine had inherited, too, a love for exterior beau- 
ty in dress or form, a taste for lavish elegance. She shone 
at tourneys, and glittered in stately processions. From hirn, 
perhaps, came that passion for political intrigue that seemed 
the only vigorous impulse of her placid nature, and for which 

C) Alberi, p. 45. 



CATHERINE'S SUPERSTITION. 265 

at times she became a murderess, reveling in the spectacle of 
her bleeding victims, or meditated and prepared the corrup- 
tion, the degradation, or the death of her own sons. 

By some ardent Roman Catholic writers Catherine is adorn- 
ed with all saintly virtues as the guardian and defender of 
the Church ; by most historians she is looked upon as an in- 
comprehensible mystery. (*) Not even her contemporaries 
could penetrate that chill and icy heart, where no maternal 
or friendly affections ever dwelt, where pity and compassion 
never came, which was dead to the sufferings of others, and 
even to her own, and discover the secret springs that guided 
her erratic policy of vacillation and crime. Yet it is possible 
that the true mystery lay in her boundless superstition. For 
the common modes of belief she had nothing but skepticism. 
She toyed with the Huguenots ; she was not afraid to cajole 
or defy the Catholics and the Pope. But before the sorcerer 
or the fortune-teller all her narrow intellect was bowed in ab- 
ject submission.^) Her credulity was, perhaps, the cause of 
her impassive cruelty. She obeyed implicitly the decrees of 
the stars ; she consulted w T ith awe the famous seer of Salon, 
Nostradamus, whose name and writings are still cherished by 
the lovers of curious mysteries, and whose rude oracles were 
freely purchased by the noble and the great of his supersti- 
tious age. She wore a mystic amulet or chain that still ex- 
ists ; she kept around her astrologers and alchemists, and pos- 
sibly believed that in all her cruelties and crimes she was gov- 
erned by an overruling fate. It is probable that a secret in- 
sanity clouded the active mind of the French Medea. Yet at 
the age of thirty-nine Catherine held in her unsteady hand the 
destiny of France. 

By her side had grown up into rare beauty and equal dis- 
simulation and pride a woman scarcely less mysterious than 
herself. The character of Mary Queen of Scots is still the 
subject of animated debate. She was the wife of Francis II., 

( J ) The Venetian embassador, Suriano, 1569, describes her as "femme sage, 
mais timide, irre'solue, et toujours femme." — Relations, etc., vol. i., p. 559. 
( 2 ) Capefigue, Francois l er , ii., p. 8. 



266 THE HUGUENOTS. 

Catherine's eldest son, now King of France.Q He was a fee- 
ble, mindless boy of sixteen ; but the acute and brilliant Mary 
was a year or two older, full of graces and accomplishments, 
of ambition and pride. In the splendid dawn of her mourn- 
ful career Mary was rightful Queen of France and Scotland, 
and the popish claimant of the crown of England. She seem- 
ed the most powerful and prosperous of living women, and, 
in the petulance of youthful pride, was accustomed to taunt 
her mother-in-law, Catherine, whom she hated, with being the 
daughter of a race of Florentine shop-keepers. The two acute 
and heartless women struggled for power ; but the contest was 
soon ended by the death of Francis and the reluctant retreat 
of Mary from the palaces and revels of Catholic France to the 
barren wilds of her Northern kingdom. 

At the head of the violent faction of the Catholics stood 
the ambitious family of the Guises. The feeble kings, and 
even the aspiring Catherine, were forced to submit to the im- 
petuous and overbearing policy of these devoted adherents of 
the papacy. It was the favorite aim of the Guises to extermi- 
nate the Huguenots, and to lay at the feet of the Roman pon- 
tiff France, purified by a general massacre of his foes. Yet the 
power of the Guises was only of recent origin. Their father, 
Duke Claude, had come up to the French court an impover- 
ished adventurer, and had died leaving enormous wealth, the 
fruit of a corrupt but successful career. His family of six 
sons were the inheritors of his fortune and power. His 
daughter was the mother of Mary of Scotland. His eldest 
son Duke Francis, ruled over the family, the court, and the 
king ; the second, Charles, Cardinal of Lorraine, had engross- 
ed innumerable benefices, and was almost the Pope of France ; 
his rare eloquence and vigorous intellect were employed with 
fatal effect in the cause of persecution; his sonorous voice 
had chanted at the Council of Trent a perpetual anathema 
against heresy. The two Guises, Duke Francis and the car- 
dinal, were called by their contemporaries " the butchers."( a ) 

.(*) Alberi,p.59. 
( 2 ) White, Massacre of St. Bartholomew, p. 85. The Duchess of Guise 
nearly fainted at one of these exhibitions. 



JEANNE D'ALBBET. 267 

Nothing stirred their savage breasts with such real joy as the 
spectacle of Huguenots dying by torture. It was the custom 
of the cardinal, after a stately dinner at his regal palace, to 
show his guests a fair array of martyrs executed for their en- 
tertainment, or sometimes to hang up a tall and stalwart re- 
former in the banqueting chamber itself. Such monsters as 
the Guises, Catherine, or her children, have never been pro- 
duced in any form of Christianity except the Roman Cath- 
olic, and are the necessary result of the Eomish doctrine of 
force. 

As if in happy contrast to Catherine and Mary, two women 
of singular piety and decorum ruled over the chiefs of the 
Huguenots. Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre and mother 
of Henry IV., governed her little kingdom with masculine 
vigor, expelled the priests and the mass, corresponded with 
Calvin, and scoffed at the malice of the Pope.Q To Jeanne 
the Huguenots owed their best counsels and their final suc- 
cess ; for she educated her son in the valleys of the Pyrenees 
to bear toil and hunger, to feed on the coarsest food, to play 
barefoot and bareheaded with the children of the villages, and 
to prepare himself by early deprivations for the duties of 
camp and court. Henry descended from his native mount- 
ains robust, tall, strong in mind and will, tender-hearted, and 
benevolent, the direct opposite of the three malicious and de- 
graded kings, his predecessors, who had been molded by the 
corrupting hand of their mother, Catherine de' Medici. An- 
other pure and courageous woman, Charlotte de Laval, wife 
of the great Coligny, inspired the most eminent of the Hu- 
guenots with her own heroic zeal. She urged, she implored 
her husband to take up arms in defense of reform ; and when 
Coligny pointed out to her, with wise and tender words, the 
dangers and sufferings that must fall upon them both if he 
yielded to her advice, she nobly promised to bear all without 
a murmur. The Huguenot mothers, in fact, in this hour of 
danger, seemed to emulate the heroism of Jeanne d'Albret 

C) De Felice, p. 14: "Jeanne introduced into Beam a puritanic austeri- 
ty. She was learned, bold, severe, the most eminent woman of her age." 



268 THE HUGUENOTS. 

and the wife of Coligny, and bid their husbands and their 
sons go forth to battle, followed by their blessings and their 
prayers. 

Yet the Huguenots were fearfully outnumbered. They 
formed scarcely a twentieth part of the population of France. 
Paris, the chief city of the realm, was intensely Catholic. 
The court and the Guises held in their power the capital and 
the government of the nation. Calvin and the Protestant 
pastors urged submission upon the persecuted Huguenots, and 
it was with sincere reluctance that Coligny and the chiefs of 
his party raised at last the standard of a religious warfare. 
A terrible atrocity suddenly aroused them to action. Q On 
Sunday, March 1st, 1562, the bells rang for service in the lit- 
tle town of Vassy, in Champagne, and a congregation of 
twelve hundred Huguenots had gathered in a large barn to 
celebrate their simple worship. Duke Francis of Guise rode 
into the village at the head of a party of soldiers on his way 
to Paris. ( 2 ) The peal of the Huguenot bells enraged the 
fanatical chief, and after dinner he led out his soldiers to dis- 
turb or destroy the peaceful worshipers. They broke into 
the barn ; the Huguenots, unarmed, threw stones at the in- 
truders, and one struck the duke on the cheek. He gave or- 
ders for a general massacre of the Protestants ; men, women> 
and children were cut down or shot by the merciless assassins ; 
few escaped unharmed from the dreadful scene; the duke, 
covered with the blood of innocence, rode on in triumph to 
Paris. He was received in the most Catholic city as the 
avenger of the Church. Surrounded by a body-guard of 
twelve hundred gentlemen (?) on horseback, he entered the 
city by the St. Denis gate amidst the applause of a vast throng 
of citizens ; the streets rang with songs and ballads composed 
in his honor. He was from this time the consecrated leader 
of the papal party ; and the priests and bishops from every 

( x ) Even De Sauclieres admits the long patience of the Huguenots : " Se 
soumit, quoique avec beaucoup de peine, a se laisser punir," etc. Yet sees 
in them only " cette secte turbulente." — Coup d'CEil, p. 4. 

( 2 ) For the massacre at Vassy, see Martin, Hist. France, x., p. 110 : "Les 
geus du due commencerent h insulter les Huguenots." 



THE HUGUENOTS EISE. 269 

pulpit celebrated that " noble lord " who had instigated and 
guided the massacre of the heretics at Yassy. A year later 
the duke lay on his dying bed, his ambition stilled forever, 
his furious rage quenched in the last agonies; and in the 
varying accounts of his dying hours it is at least certain that 
there rose up before him the picture of the pious congrega- 
tion he had so ruthlessly destroyed — a memory of the wicked- 
est of all his evil deeds. 

At the news from Yassy the Huguenots rose in arms, and 
for ten years all France was filled with civil discord ; the fac- 
tories were closed, the seats of industry sunk into decay, and 
the vigor of the nation was wasted in a useless warfare ; the 
Duke of Guise, fierce, ambitious, full of physical and mental 
power, fell, in the opening of the contest which he had begun, 
by the hand of an assassin. His death was charged upon 
Coligny, who denied the accusation, but scarcely condemned 
the act. The war raged with new violence, and the Hugue- 
nots repaid, with dreadful retaliations, the savage deeds of 
their foes. Frequent truces were made ; the nation sighed for 
peace ; and even Catherine herself would have consented to 
grant toleration to reform, would have aided in giving harmo- 
ny and prosperity to France. But the Pope and the Italian 
faction still ruled in the divided nation, and saw without a 
sentiment of pity or regret the horrors they had occasioned, 
the fierce passions they had aroused, the holy impulses they 
had stifled forever. They called incessantly for the total ex- 
termination of the Huguenots ;Q they lamented every truce 
as impious, denounced every effort toward conciliation ; they 
inculcated a merciless cruelty, an undying hatred. Paul IY., 
maddened with strong wine and the insanity of a corrupt old 
age, had instigated the latest persecutions that led to the civil 
wars of France.Q His successors, Pius IY. and Y., fanned 
the fires of strife, and called incessantly for blood ; they aim- 

(*) Pius V. to Catherine, April 13th, 1569, urged the complete extirpation 
of the Huguenots. He pressed Charles IX., March 28th, 1569, to destroy 
them. Yet to the papal historians this barbarian is a model of decorum. 
feee Platina, Vitse Pont., p. 390, etc. 

( 2 ) Ranke notices Paul's excessive indulgence in wine. 



270 THE HUGUENOTS. 

ed the assassin's dagger, or roused the evil passions of devout 
Catholics, by insisting upon the duty of repressing heresy by 
force; nor can there be found in history, except, perhaps, 
among their own predecessors, three sovereigns who have so 
increased the sum of human misery — three potentates, in any 
age, who have less deserved the name of Christians. 

The teachings of the Popes and the violence of the Catholic 
faction led to the massacre of St. Bartholomew.^) Catherine 
de' Medici, weary of incessant civil war, guided, perhaps, by 
her malignant star, had resolved to gratify the court of Rome, 
the Guises, and the Parisians by a total extermination of all 
those eminent and generous chiefs who had so long defied 
the armies of their Catholic foes. Within her dark, inscru- 
table breast had been matured a plot of singular efficacy for 
drawing into her toils the leaders of the Huguenots ; and the 
lessons she had learned in the school of Macchiavelli were 
exemplified with matchless power. It is impossible, indeed, 
to believe that St. Bartholomew was not premeditated ;( 2 ) it 
seems certain that a rumor of the approaching horror had 
filled the extreme faction of the Catholics with secret joy. A 
hollow pacification had been arranged. Catherine proposed 
to Jeanne d'Albret and the Huguenot chiefs to complete the 
union of the two parties by marrying her daughter Marguerite 
with young Henry of Navarre. Catherine's son, Charles IX., 
consented to the match, and pressed it in spite of the opposi- 
tion of the Pope; and in the summer of 1572 the ominous 
wedding was celebrated at Paris with rare pomp and bound- 
less ostentation. 

Young Henry of Navarre, at nineteen, frank, generous, a 
Huguenot in faith if not in practice, was brought up by his 
mother, Jeanne, Queen of Navarre, to be married to the daugh- 
ter of her bitterest foe, and to mingle with a society and a 
court whose profligacy and corruption she had ever shrunk 

ODe Felice, p. 167. 

( 2 ) Most modern writers have abandoned the theory of premeditation; 
but the proof is strong on the other side. See an able and learned article 
in the North British Review, St. Bartholomew, October, 1869; and Martin, 
Hist, de France, x., p. 553. 



DEATH OF JEANNE D'ALBRET. 271 

from with disdain. It would have been well for the austere 
queen had she still repelled the advances of her rival. But 
Jeanne seems to have yielded to the arts of Catherine, and to 
have believed that some trace of womanly tenderness lingered 
in the breast of the new Medea. She consented, for the sake 
of the oppressed Huguenots, to suffer her son to marry the 
child of the house of Yalois, and ventured to come up to Paris, 
the citadel of her foes. Her death soon followed. Whether 
premature age filled with sorrows and doubts had weighed her 
down, sudden disease, or secret poison, the annalists of the pe- 
riod could not determine ; but among the Huguenots, shocked 
at the suddenness of their loss,' arose a dark suspicion that their 
favorite queen had died by the Italian arts of Catherine. It 
was said that the mother of the expected bride had poisoned 
the mother of the bridegroom by presenting her with a pair 
of perfumed gloves, prepared with a deadly powder ; it was 
believed that the austere and spotless Queen of Navarre had 
been lured into the Circean circle of the French court to be 
made away with the more securely. Yet Jeanne d'Albret 
died, as she had lived, a stern reformer, an example and a 
warning. The corrupt ladies of Catherine's court, who visit- 
ed her in her last hours, saw with wonder that the courageous 
queen needed none of the customary ceremonies of the Papal 
Church. She asked only the prayers of the Huguenot pastors 
and the simple rites of the apostolic faith. Q 

Meantime Paris was filled with a throng of the bravest and 
noblest of the reformers, who had been lured into the centre 
of their foes.( 2 ) Coligny, loyal, and trusting the word of his 
king, rode boldly into the fatal snare. Wise and faithful 
friends had warned him of his imprudence ; a devoted peasant 
woman clung to his horse's rein and begged him not to trust 
to the deceivers; but no entreaties or warnings could shake 
his resolution. He was followed by his companions in arms, 
the heroes of many a brilliant contest. But it was noticed 
that as the Huguenots entered the city no cheer of reconcilia- 
tion arose from the bigoted citizens ; that the streets were 

O M6m. Marguerite, p. 24. ( 2 ) Sully, Mem. i., p. 21-30. 



272 THE HUGUENOTS. 

filled with menacing faces ; that every eye was averted in 
hatred and gloom. Q Henry of Navarre and his cousin, the 
Prince of Conde, came to Paris in the first days of August, 
and were lodged in the palace of the Louvre. Coligny and 
his followers occupied an inn or hotel on the street of Bresse. 
The king, Charles IX., Catherine, and the young Duke of 
Guise received their victims with eager civility, and Charles 
welcomed Coligny almost as a father. The city rang with 
revelry ; the young princes, Henry, Conde, the Dukes of Anjou 
and Alencon, and Charles IX., joined with ardor in the revels 
and sports ; and Catherine, surrounded by a corrupt train of 
beautiful women, inspired the dreadful hilarity. 

Paris, in the sixteenth century, possessed few of those at- 
tractions that have made it, in the nineteenth, the most mag- 
nificent of cities.Q It was renowned chiefly for its narrow 
and filthy streets, not paved or lighted, the perpetual haunt of 
fever or plague ; for its sordid and often starving population ; 
and for the fierce superstition of its monks and priests. Sev- 
eral grand hotels of the nobility, each a well-garrisoned for- 
tress, arose amidst its meaner dwellings. The new palace of 
the Louvre, lately built by Francis I., was the residence of the 
court ;( 3 ) but the Tuileries was unfinished, and the Palais Poy- 
al did not yet exist ; and high walls, pierced by lofty gates, 
shut in the mediseval city from the free air of the surround- 
ing plains.Q Yet in the hot summer of 1572 its streets were 
filled with a brilliant multitude come up to witness the marriage 
of Henry and Marguerite, of the Protestant and the Catholic, 
and every eye was fixed with curiosity and expectation upon 
the preparations for the splendid ceremony. Henry, the gen- 
erous son of the mountains, was already renowned for his cour- 
age and his manly grace ; Marguerite was known only as the 

(') The Catholic writers deny premeditation, on the testimony of An j on, 
Marguerite, and Tavaunes. See De Sauclieres, p. 236. But Sorbon, the 
king's confessor, proclaims it ; so Capilupi, Salviati, and Michiel. 

( 2 ) Paris Guide, p. 557, Le Palais du Louvre. 

( 3 ) Yet we could scarcely call the Louvre a sanctuary, with De Lastey- 
rie : " C'est un sanctuaire," p. 557. 

( 4 ) Paris Guide, p. 560. 



MARGUERITE'S WEDDING. 273 

child of the corrupt Catherine. Her life had been passed in 
ceaseless terror under the iron sway of her mother, the enmity 
of her brother of Anjou, and the doubtful favor of Charles. 
Yet she had wit and talent, a pleasing manner, a graceful per- 
son, a natural duplicity encouraged by her early training ; and 
few of the virtues of her namesake, the elder and purer Mar- 
guerite, had descended to her luckless grandniece. But the 
young pair were still in the bloom of youth when all Paris at- 
tended their nuptials. 

The wedding was celebrated on the 18th of August, beneath 
a pavilion richly adorned, in front of the Church of Notre 
Dame. It was performed with neither Protestant nor Cath- 
olic rites.Q Henry, attended by the king, Charles IX., and the 
two royal dukes, all dressed alike in yellow satin, covered with 
precious stones, and followed by a long array of princes and 
nobles, attired in various colors, ascended the platform ; the 
king led in his sister, who was robed in violet velvet, em- 
broidered with the lilies of France and glittering with pearls 
and diamonds. Catherine de' Medici followed, surrounded by 
a fair, frail circle of maids of honor. A bright summer sun 
shone on the gay pageant and gleamed over the towers of 
Notre Dame. The ceremony was performed by the Cardinal 
Bourbon ; but no sooner was it ended than the bride left her 
husband to witness mass in the cathedral, while Henry turn- 
ed sternly away from the unscriptural rite. In the evening a 
grand entertainment was given in the Louvre; maskers and 
royal and noble revelers filled its wide saloons, and for sev- 
eral days afterward Paris was a scene of strange merriment, 
and of feasts and tourneys, upon which the wiser Huguenots 
looked with grave disdain.( 2 ) 

But the dreadful day was near when the secret purpose of 
the wild revels was to be perfectly fulfilled. The week which 
had opened with the wedding - feast and the carousal was to 
close in more than funereal gloom. Charles and Catherine 

C) Sully, i., P . 21. 

( 2 ) Marguerite, M6moires, Guessard, e'diteur, p. 25-27, has described with 
minuteness the splendor of her dress and of the pageant. 

18 



274 THE HUGUENOTS. 

had constantly assured the Pope that the marriage was only 
designed to insure the destruction of the Huguenots. Orders 
were sent to the Governor of Lyons to allow no couriers to 
pass on to Rome until the 24th of August. It was intended 
that the news of the wedding and the massacre should reach 
the Holy Father at the same moment. Q The Huguenots, un- 
conscious of danger, still remained in Paris. On Friday, the 
22d, they were startled from their security by the first deed 
of crime. Coligny was shot at by order of the young Duke 
of Guise, and was borne back to his inn wounded, though 
not mortally, amidst the rage of his companions and the secret 
joy of his foes. In the hot days of August, amidst the noi- 
some streets of Paris, the admiral lay on his couch, surround- 
ed by his bravest followers in arms. He was surprised by a 
visit from the king, who came to express his sympathy for his 
suffering friend — his rage at his treacherous foe. But with 
him came also Catherine, who wept over the wounded Coligny, 
and the Duke of Anjou, apparently equally grieved, but who 
were only spies upon the impulsive king. They feared that 
the wise and good Coligny might succeed in awakening the 
better element in the nature of the unhappy Charles. 

From this moment a gloom settled upon the crowded city, 
and its Catholic people, no doubt, felt that the hour of venge- 
ance drew near.( 2 ) On Saturday, the 23d, the Huguenots 
could scarcely go into the streets without danger. They 
gathered around the bedside of Coligny, or in the chamber of 
Henry of Navarre, but seem never to have thought of escape. 
They breathed out threats against the assassin, Guise ; yet 
they still trusted to the professions of Catherine and the word 
of the king. ISTor does Charles seem to have been altogether 
resolute in his horrible design. He wavered, he trembled, he 
was weary of bloodshed. His feeble, imperfect intellect seems 
still to have turned to his friend Coligny for support, and 



Q Martin, Hist. Fran., x. This letter seems of itself to prove premedi- 
tation. 

( 2 ) Le Tocsin contre les Autheurs, etc., Archives Curieuses, l er s6r., vol. 
vii., p. 42-50. 



CHARLES IX. IRRESOLUTE. 275 

Catherine saw with secret rage that some traits of humanity 
and softness still lingered in the breast she had striven to 
make as cold and malevolent as her own.Q 

The August night of the 23d sunk down over Paris, and 
upon its narrow streets and gloomy lanes a strange stillness 
rested. The citizens awaited in silence the signal for the mas- 
sacre of the Huguenots and the perfect fulfillment of the con- 
stant injunctions from Rome. Every Catholic, every Parisian, 
knew that the Popes had never ceased to inculcate a general 
destruction of the heretics. The king's body-guard had been 
stationed under arms in the city ; the citizens were provided 
with weapons at the public cost ; the houses of the Huguenots 
were marked to guide the murderers to their doors ; the Cath- 
olic assassins were enjoined to wear a white cross to distin- 
guish them from their victims. But while all was still with- 
out, in a retired chamber of the Louvre a scene of human 
passion and wickedness was exhibited such as can scarcely be 
paralleled in history. A mother was urging her half-insane 
son to an unequaled deed of crime. Charles hesitated to give 
the final order. Soon after midnight Catherine had risen, 
perhaps from sleep, and gone to the king's chamber. She 
found Charles irresolute, and excited by a terrible mental 
struggle. He was probably insane. At one moment he cried 
out that he would call upon the Huguenots to protect his life ; 
at another he overwhelmed with reproaches his brother An- 
jou, whom he hated and feared, and who had now entered the 
room. The other members of the guilty council — Guise, Se- 
vers, and their associates — followed and gathered around the 
king. He still paced the room with rapid steps, incapable of 
decision. But Catherine, roused to a fierce rage, her voice fill- 
ed with sinister meaning, told Charles that it was too late to 
recede, and that the order must be given. The king,( 2 ) still 
scarcely twenty -two years old, accustomed from infancy to 



0) White, Mass., p. 396. 

( 2 ) Marguerite, Memoires, p. 29, describes Charles as " tres-prudent, et qui 
avoit este toujours tres-obeissant a la royne ma mere, et prince tres-Ca- 
tholique," p. 31. 



276 THE HUGUENOTS. 

tremble before his mother's glance, his mind enfeebled by dis- 
sipation and crime, conscious that if he disobeyed that men- 
acing tone his own life was not safe, and that Catherine might 
remove him by her secret arts to place her favorite Anjou on 
his throne,^) in a sudden access of terror or of frenzy, gave 
the fatal command. From this moment all that was gentle 
in his nature died forever, and he became the chief promoter 
of the general massacre, the active instrument in the hands of 
unsparing Rome. 

Guise at once went swiftly from the room to begin the la- 
bor of death by the murder of Coligny.Q The clash of his 
horse's hoofs resounded in the still Sabbath morning as he 
led a party of soldiers to the admiral's quarters. Catherine, 
Charles, and the other conspirators, terrified at what they had 
done, kept closely together, and gathered at a window over- 
looking the tennis court. "We were smitten," says Anjou, 
" with terror and foreboding." Catherine, it is said, even sent 
to recall Guise ; but he replied, " It is too late." Coligny had 
been stabbed in his bed-chamber, and his body thrown out of 
the window into the court below. Many Huguenots perished 
with him. The death of the chief of the reformers roused the 
conspirators to new energy, and Catherine gave orders that the 
signal for the general massacre should be given before the ap- 
pointed hour. The clock of the Church of St. Germain 1' Aux- 
errois sounded over silent Paris.Q Its ominous peal awoke 
an awful clamor, such as the earth had never witnessed before. 
A clang of bells responded from every tower and belfry ; the 
adherents of the Pope seized their arms, rushed to the houses 
of the Huguenots, and murdered every inmate, from the sleep- 
ing infant to the gray-haired grandsire and the helpless maid. 
The city had been suddenly illuminated, and from every 
Catholic house the blaze of torches lighted up the labor of 

( : ) Henri de Valois, par De Noailles, pp. 1,2, describes the endless schemes 
of Catherine to make Anjou king. 

( 2 ) Martin, Hist. Fran., x., p. 567 ; De Felice, p. 164-167 ; Sully, Mem., i., 
p. 25. They cut off Coligny's head and brought it to Catherine. 

( 3 ) Le Tocsin, Archives Curieuses, l er ser., vol. vii., p. 54 : " Toute la ville 
fut en un instant toute remplie de corps morts de tout sexe et age." 



THE LOUVRE. 277 

death. Beneath their rays were seen women unsexed, and 
children endowed with an unnatural malice, torturing and 
treating with strange malignity the dying and the dead. It 
is impossible, indeed, to narrate the details of this awful event, 
over which Catholic kings and priests rejoiced, and for which 
the infallible Pope at Rome gave public thanks to God. 

Within the palace of the Louvre itself, where a few days 
before every saloon had rung with festivity, and where mask 
and dance and throngs of gallant knights and maidens had 
greeted the nuptials of Henry and Marguerite, now echoed 
the groans of the dying Huguenots, and the shrieks of the 
terrified queen.Q In the evening Marguerite had been driven 
by her enraged mother from her presence and from the arms 
of her sister Claude, who would have detained her, and was 
forced to go, trembling, to the apartment of her husband, lest 
her absence might excite suspicion. She lay awake all night, 
filled with a sense of impending danger. She pretended that 
she knew nothing of the approaching event. Henry's rooms 
were filled with his companions in arms, who passed the night 
in uttering vain threats against the Guises, and planning proj- 
ects of revenge. Toward morning they all went out in com- 
pany with the king ; and Marguerite, weary with watching, 
sunk into a brief slumber. She was aroused by a loud cry 
without of " Navarre ! Navarre !" and a knocking at the 
door.( 2 ) It was thrown open ; a man, wounded and bleeding, 
pursued by four soldiers, rushed into the room, and threw 
his arms around the queen. He clung to her, begging for 
life. She screamed in her terror. The captain of the guard 
came in and drove off the soldiers, and the wounded Hugue- 
not was allowed to hide himself in her closet. Marguerite 
fled hastily across the halls of the Louvre to her sister's room, 
and, as she passed amidst the scene that had so lately rung 
with the masks and revels of her wedding night, she saw an- 
other Huguenot pierced by the spear of his pursuer, and heard 



C) M6moires, etc., de Marguerite de Valois, par. M. F. Guessard, e"diteur, 
p. 32. Marguerite's narrative may be relied ou for personal details. 
( a ) Me"m. Marguerite, p. 34. 



278 TEE HUGUENOTS. 

the clamor of the general massacre. Faint and trembling, she 
went to her mother and the king, threw herself at their feet, 
and begged the lives of two of her husband's retainers. 

Meantime, when Henry of Navarre had left his room in the 
morning, he had been arrested, and carried to the king's cham- 
ber ; but of the band of Hnguenots who had attended him 
in the night only a few escaped. Each man, as he passed out 
into the court, between two lines of Swiss guards, was stabbed 
without mercy. Two hundred of the noblest and purest re- 
formers of France lay piled in a huge heap before the win- 
dows of the Louvre ; Charles IX., Catherine, and her infa- 
mous train of maids of honor inspected and derided them as 
they lay dead. All through that fearful Sabbath day, the 
feast of St. Bartholomew, and for two succeeding days, the 
murders went on; the whole city was in arms; every hat or 
cap was marked with a white cross, and every Catholic was 
converted into an assassin.Q Charles, a raging lunatic, rode 
through the streets, laughing and jesting over the fallen. 
The streets were filled with corpses ; the Seine was turned to 
blood ; many Catholics grew rich by the plunder of the Hu- 
guenots ; and it was believed that the king and his brother, 
Anjou, shared the spoils of opulent merchants and skillful 
goldsmiths. The papal nuncio, Salviati, overjoyed at the 
spectacle, wrote to the Pope that nothing was to be seen in 
the streets but white crosses, producing a fine effect ; he did 
not see the heaps of dead, nor the scenes of inexpiable crime. 
Charles IX. shot at the flying Huguenots from his bedroom 
window. The rage of the murderers was chiefly, turned 
against women and infants.Q One man threw two little 
children into the Seine from a basket ; another infant was 
dragged through the streets with a cord tied around its neck 
by a crowd of Catholic children ; a babe smiled in the face 
of the man who had seized it, and played with his beard, but 



C) Le Tocsin, a contemporary account, describes how poor slioe-makers 
and tailors died for their faith ; how women and children were thrown into 
the Seine, p. 57. The particulars can not be repeated. 

( 2 ) Le Tocsiu, p. 54-57. 



THE MASSACRE COMMEMORATED. 279 

the monster stabbed the child, and, with an oath, threw it into 
the Seine. 

For three days the massacre continued with excessive atroc- 
ities. A month later, Huguenots were still being murdered in 
Paris. It is computed that several thousand persons perished 
in that city alone. In every part of the kingdom, by orders 
of the king, an effort was made to exterminate the Hugue- 
nots ; and Lyons, Orleans, Bordeaux, and all the provincial 
towns ran with blood. Four thousand reformers are said to 
have been killed in Lyons. At Bordeaux, Auger, the most 
eloquent of the Jesuit preachers, employed all his powers in 
urging on the work of slaughter. " Who," he cried, " exe- 
cuted the divine judgments at Paris ? The angel of the Lord. 
And who will execute them in Bordeaux ? The angel of the 
Lord, however man may try to resist him !" The number of 
the slain throughout France has been variously estimated at 
from ten to one hundred thousand. History has no parallel 
to offer to this religious massacre, even in its most barbarous 
periods. 

The Pope, Gregory XIII., received the news of the fate of 
the Huguenots with unbounded joy.Q The wish of his heart 
had been gratified, and Charles IX. was now his favorite son. 
Rome rang with rejoicings. The guns of the Castle of St. An- 
gelo gave forth a joyous salute ; the bells sounded from every 
tower; bonfires blazed throughout the night; and Gregory, 
attended by his cardinals and priests, led the magnificent pro- 
cession to the Church of St. Louis, where the Cardinal of Lor- 
raine, the brother of the Duke of Guise, chanted a Te Deum. 
The cry of the dying host in France was gentle harmony to 
the Court of Rome. A medal was struck to commemorate 
the glorious massacre ; a picture, which still exists in the Vat- 
ican, was painted by Yasari, representing the chief events of 
St. Bartholomew. The Pope, eager to show his gratitude to 
Charles for his dutiful conduct, sent him the Golden Rose ; 
and from the pulpits of Rome eloquent preachers celebrated 

C) Le Tocsin, p. 76: "Louant Dieu qu'a son adveuenieut a la papaute 
une si bonne et heureuse nouvelles s'etait presentee." 



280 THE HUGUENOTS. 

Charles, Catherine, and the Guises as the new founders of the 
Papal Church. Q 

But from every Protestant land one cry of reproach and 
detestation arose against those royal murderers and assassins 
who had covered with infamy their country, and even their 
age. The intelligent were affrighted at a barbarity that seem- 
ed worthy only of an Attila or an Alaric ; the humane and 
the good looked upon the massacre in France as something 
portentous and almost incredible. Clothed in mourning, with 
every eye turned away in gloom and aversion, the English court 
and its Protestant queen received the French embassador, La 
Mothe Fenelon, after the intelligence of the fatal event ; and 
the envoy himself, touched with shame, confessed that he 
blushed for his country. The mild Emperor of Germany, 
Maximilian II., lamented that his son-in-law, Charles IX., had 
incurred such an overwhelming load of guilt. The Protest- 
ant powers of the North joined in the general condemnation. 
Philip II. of Spain alone laughed aloud — for the only time, 
it is said — when he heard how well Catherine had performed 
her task. Yet Catherine herself soon found that her bloody 
deed was only injurious to herself. She hated the Guises, 
she feared Philip II., she despised the Pope; but to them 
alone could she now look for support and countenance. New 
dangers thickened around her. The Huguenots, enraged at 
the massacre, rose once more in arms; the sympathy of En- 
gland encouraged the revolt ; Catherine endeavored to excuse 
or explain her share in the massacre, and discovered that she 
had committed a great crime in vain.( 8 ) 

But upon the feeble intellect of her unhappy son the effect 
of the dreadful deed he had witnessed and directed was fatal. 
The fierce excitement had scarcely passed away when his 
health began to decline. His mind was torn by remorse and 

(') It was the working-men who had chiefly suffered by the massacre. 
At Meaux "une grand nombre d'artisans" suffered. The murders were 
joined with general robbery. See Alberi, Vita Cat. Med., p. 147. 

( 2 ) Alberi, p. 382. She makes Charles IX. declare that it was a political 
conspiracy that produced the massacre ; to Philip II. she wrote on the 29th 
of August, thanking God for his mercy. 



THE EDICT OF NAXTES. 281 

terror ; his conscience never slept. Around him in the air he 
heard strange noises like the voices of the dying Huguenots. 
The ghosts of the murdered stood by his bedside ; his room 
seemed suffused with blood. His nurse who had reared him 
when an infant was a Huguenot, and now watched over him 
as he was dying. " Oh, nurse !" he cried to her, amidst sobs 
and tears, " what shall I do ? I am lost ! I am lost !" She 
tried to soothe him with the hope that repentance and a Sav- 
iour's righteousness might save his guilty soul. Catherine 
came to him soon after with the good news of the capture of 
one of her enemies. " Madame," he said, " such things con- 
cern me no longer. I am dying." He received the last rites 
of the Eoman Church, and died soon after. Catherine's fa- 
vorite son, the Duke of Anjou, for whom she had plotted and 
schemed with incessant labors, now became king, and it was 
believed that the miserable Charles had been carried off by 
poison administered by his mother. 

Catherine died, her son was assassinated, her guilty race 
faded from the earth, and Henry of Navarre became King 
of France. In 1598 the Edict of Nantes gave peace to the 
Huguenots, and once more a period of progress and reform 
opened upon the prosperous realm. In the dawn of the seven- 
teenth century there was still hope for France. Vigorous, 
energetic, industrious, intellectual, the Huguenot element in 
the nation began rapidly to sweep away the barbarism of the 
age. The reformers were everywhere active. They incul- 
cated industry, and soon in every part of France grew up 
flourishing manufactures and a valuable trade.Q The moral 
vigor of the people was renewed ; honesty, purity, and mental 
culture supplanted the barren dreams of chivalry and the cor- 
ruption and indolence of the Catholic rule. Great Protestant 
churches were erected, in which immense congregations list- 
ened to their accomplished preachers and heard lessons of 
virtue and self-restraint. To be as "honest as a Huguenot" 

C 1 ) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 130. " The Huguenots were excellent farm- 
ers ; manufactured silk, velvet, paper, and a great number of other arti- 
cles. See "Weiss, Hist, of the French Protestant Refugees, p. 27. 



282 TEE HUGUENOTS. 

was a common proverb. To be industrious, frugal, generous, 
sincere, was discovered to be far better than to be a Conde or 
a Montmorency. The period of progress continued long aft- 
er the death of Henry IY. ; and even Richelieu, who crushed 
the Huguenots forever as a political party, never sought to 
extirpate them wholly. In the dawn of the reign of Louis 
XIY. the nation still advanced under the influence of Hugue- 
not principles, and the most eminent men of the age belonged 
to the party of reform. The wise Colbert was a Huguenot ;Q 
the poets, orators, and authors of the day reflected the vigor of 
the new movement; the Protestant schools and colleges in- 
spired with new life the fading intellect of France. ( 2 ) 

Then once more the tyrannical hand of Rome was stretched 
forth to crush the rising impulse of reform. But it was now 
the disciples of Loyola and Lainez that aroused the last great 
persecution of the Huguenots. Louis XI V., in the latter pe- 
riod of his reign, guided by the counsels of the Chancellor 
Le Tellier and the Jesuit Pere La Chaise, resolved to win the 
favor of Heaven by a complete destruction of the heretics. 
Madame De Maintenon, herself once a Huguenot, confirmed 
the malevolence of the king, and grew rich by the plunder of 
the reformers. Slowly the cloud of ruin gathered around all 
those fair and prosperous communities that had sprung up 
under the influence of the new faith. The Huguenots foresaw 
with hopeless alarm their own final destruction. They held 
in their hands the commerce, manufactures, and the wealth of 
the nation ; but they were comparatively few in numbers, and 
had no longer any hope of resistance. Their churches were 
torn down ; their printing - presses were silenced ; they were 
forbidden to sing psalms on land or water ; were only allowed 
to bury their dead at night or at day -break ; and were oppress- 
ed by all the malicious devices of the Jesuit fathers. Yet 
they submitted patiently, and still hoped to soften the rage of 
their enemies by holy lives and Christian charity. Stricken by 
a mortal disease, Chancellor Le Tellier, from his bed of death, 

(*) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 135. Colbert was honest, and died poor. 
( 2 ) Martin, Hist. Fran., xiv., p. 667 et seq. ; Stephens. 



INHUMAN ORATORS. 283 

prayed the king to revoke the Edict of Xantes, and extirpate 
the Huguenots. Q He died rejoicing that he had once more 
awakened the fires of persecution. Louis XIV. obeyed the 
commands of the Jesuits, and repealed (1685) the edict of 
toleration that had alone given hope to France. A wide 
scene of horror spread over the flourishing realm. Every 
Huguenot dwelling was invaded by fierce dragoons, ( 2 ) the 
wealth of the industrious reformers was snatched from them 
by the indolent and envious Catholics ; the manufactories 
were deserted, flourishing cities sunk into ruin ; and such 
crimes were perpetrated by the savage soldiers of Louis as can 
only be paralleled in the various persecutions instigated by 
the Popes of Borne. Yet the king and his courtiers found 
only a cruel joy in the sufferings of the people. Even litera- 
ture, the faded product of the corrupt age, celebrated Louis 
as the destroyer of heresy ; and the infamous band of gifted 
preachers who adorn and disgrace this period of human woe 
united in adoring the wisdom of their master and the piety 
of the Jesuits. Bossuet, with rare eloquence and singular in- 
humanity, triumphed in the horrors of persecution ; Massillon 
repeated the praises of the pitiless Louis; Flechier, the pride 
of the Eomish pulpit, exulted in the dreadful massacres; 
Bourdaloue was sent to preach in the bleeding and desolate 
provinces, and obeyed without remonstrance ; and the whole 
Catholic priesthood were implicated in the fearful crimes of 
that fatal period. ( 3 ) The wise, the good, the gentle Huguenots 
became the prey of the vile, the cruel, and the proud. 

(*) Sismondi, xxv., p. 514. 

( 2 ) " Les dragons ont e"te" de tres-bons missionn aires," wrote Madame De 
Maintenon, Sismondi, xxv., p. 521; and she bought up at a low price the 
estates of the exiled Huguenots. 

( 3 ) Hist. Fanat., 1692, par M. De Brueys ; Archives Curieuses, vol. ii., p. 
318. Bossuet, Oraison funebre de Michel Le Tellier, p. 333. Flechier 
boasted that Le Tellier had given the last blow to the dying sect. Orai- 
son funebre de M. Le Tellier, 1686, p. 354. The inhumanity of Massillon, 
Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Flechier makes them responsible for the horrors 
of the dragonnades. Eminent in eloquence, in cruelty they were still bar- 
barians. Fenelon alone protested against the persecution. Racine vent- 
ured to assail covertly the persecutor. 



284 THE HUGUENOTS. 

Nothing is more remarkable in history than the constant 
hostility the Church of Rome has always shown toward the 
working-classes — the fatal result of Catholic influence upon 
industry and thrift. Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp, under the 
rule of Alva and the Jesuits^ 1 ) saw their commerce and manu- 
factures sink forever, and their laboring-classes fly to Amster- 
dam and Leyden. Spain and Italy, under the destructive activ- 
ity of the Popes and the Inquisition, were soon reduced from 
the highest prosperity to a low rank in commerce and trade. 
Swarms of monks and nuns took the place of honest laborers, 
and industry was extirpated to maintain the corrupted Church. 
It was only when England ceased to be Catholic that it began 
to lead the world in letters and in energy. It was when Ger- 
many had thrown off the papal rule that it produced a Goethe 
and a Schiller, and in the present day the traveler is everywhere 
struck by a remarkable dissimilarity. In Catholic Ireland all 
is sloth and decay, empty pride and idle superstition. In Prot- 
estant Ireland all is life, energy, and progress. A Catholic 
canton of Switzerland is always noted for its degraded labor- 
ing-class, their indolence and vice. The Protestant cantons 
abound in all the traits of advance. The Pomagna and the 
Papal States, so long as they remained under the rule of the 
Popes, were the centres of sloth, improvidence, and crime, and 
brigands ruled over desolate fields that might have glowed 
with abundant harvests. In France, under Louis XI V., the 
whole energy of the Jesuits and the king was directed to the 
ruin of the laboring - classes, and their vigorous efforts were 
followed by a signal success. Seldom has so dreadful a revul- 
sion fallen upon the industrial population of any nation. It 
was as if the factories of Lowell or Manchester were suddenly 
closed, and half their population murdered or sent into exile ; 
as if every Protestant were driven from New York, and every 
warehouse plundered in Boston. Hundreds of factories were 
destroyed, many villages were deserted, many large towns half 
depopulated, and great districts of the richest land in France 

C) See Relation d'Antoine Tiepolo, p. 143. They had revolted to save 
their commerce and industry. 



PRIESTS PERSECUTE INDUSTRY. 2S5 

became once more a wilderness.Q At Tours, of forty thou- 
sand persons employed in the silk manufacture, scarcely four 
thousand remained; the population of Nantes was reduced 
one-half ; it is estimated( 2 ) that one hundred thousand persons 
perished in Languedoc alone, one-tenth of them by fire, stran- 
gulation, or the rack ! Such was the victory of the faith over 
which Massillon, Bossuet, and Bourdaloue broke forth into loud 
applause ; for which they celebrated the miserable king, with 
whose vices they were perfectly familiar, as the restorer of the 
Church. " Let our acclamations ascend to heaven," said Bos- 
suet, " let us greet this new Constantine, this exterminator of 
the heretics, and say, ' King of heaven, preserve the king of 
earth.' " "At the first blow dealt by the great Louis," cried 
Massillon over the general massacre, " heresy falls, disappears, 
and bears its malice and its bitterness to foreign lands."( 3 ) 

Rome and the Pope, too, were eloquent in congratulation 
over the ruin of the working - classes of France. Te Deums 
were sung; processions moved from shrine to shrine; the 
Pope addressed a letter to Louis filled with his praises. ( 4 ) The 
whole Romish Church rejoiced in the slaughter of the heretics. 
Public thanksgivings were offered at Paris; medals were 
struck to commemorate the fortunate event ; a brazen statue 
was erected to Louis on the Hotel de Ville, with a brief Latin 
inscription, " To the asserter of the dignity of kings and of the 
Church." During the Revolution it was converted into can- 
non, to be aimed against the throne and the priesthood. 

There now occurred in the course of their annals that won- 
derful spectacle of heroism and devotion, the flight of the Hu- 
guenots from France.( 6 ) The pure, the wise, the good, the no- 

( 1 ) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 169. Weiss, i., p. 116. 

( 2 ) By Boulainvers, De Felice, p. 340. 

( 3 ) I have abridged the eloquence of the two inhuman preachers. La 
Liberte" de la Conscience, J. Simon, p. 186, ventures to mention their dis- 
grace. 

( 4 ) Weiss, i., p. 125. 

( 5 ) Weiss, Hist, des Re'fngie's Protestants de France, describes the period 
from Henry IV., the revocation, the emigration. He has been freely used 
by later writers. 



286 THE HUGUENOTS. 

ble, the wealthy or the poor, animated by a common resolution 
to preserve their faith at the cost of all they held dear, re- 
solved to abandon their native land and throw themselves 
upon the charity of strangers. From every part of France, in 
mournful processions, in secret, by night, in strange disguises, 
and in fearful sufferings and dangers, great companies of men, 
women, children, made their way to the frontiers. No sever- 
ity could restrain them; no offers of emolument or favors 
could induce them to accept the Romish creed. Louis and his 
priestly advisers dispatched the tierce dragoons in pursuit of 
the fugitives, and filled the galleys and the prisons with their 
helpless captives. The unparalleled enormities inflicted upon 
the flying Huguenots can scarcely be described in history. Q 
Yet still the wonderful flight went on. Powerful nobles, the 
owners of great estates, left their ancestral homes, and, through 
a thousand dangers, escaped impoverished to Germany and 
Switzerland. Fair and gentle women, accustomed to the ease 
and luxury of the chateau and the city, stole forth disguised, 
often in the midst of winter, and thought themselves happy if, 
clambering over the snow -clad hills, and wandering through 
the wild forest of Ardennes, they could at last reach, with 
broken health and exhausted resources, a shelter in the free 
cities of Holland. Two young ladies of Bergerac, disguised as 
boys, set out on the perilous journey. It was winter; yet 
they plunged bravely into the forest of Ardennes, on foot, and 
with wonderful constancy pressed on beneath the dripping 
trees, along the woodland roads, oppressed by hunger, cold, 
privation ; and for thirty leagues joyfully pursued their dan- 
gerous way. Their constancy never wavered ; they were sus- 
tained by the hope of approaching freedom. But the guards 
seized them as they approached the frontier, and threw them 
into prison. Their sex was discovered ; they were tried, con- 
demned, and shut up for the remainder of their lives in the 
Convent of the Repentants at Paris. 

The Lord of Castelfranc, near Rochelle, with his wife and 
family, set out in an open boat to escape to England. He was 

C) See M6uioires d'uii Protestant condamne' aux Galeres. 



GENEROUS GENEVA. 287 



overtaken. Three of his sons and three of his daughters were 
sent as slaves to the Caribbean Islands ; three other daughters 
were held some time in confinement, and were then allowed to 
escape to Geneva. The slaves were finally liberated, and the 
family were afterward reunited in England. The two Misses 
Raboteau, who lived near Rochelle, refused to become con- 
verts to Eomanism, and were then offered the alternative of 
marrying two Roman Catholics or being shut up for life in a 
convent.Q They resolved to fly. Their uncle, who was a 
wine-merchant, inclosed each young lady in a large cask, and 
thus conveyed them on board one of his ships. They reach- 
ed Dublin in safety, married, and several eminent and gifted 
Englishmen trace their origin to the brave fugitives. 

Geneva, the city of Calvin, showed unbounded generosity to 
the distressed Huguenots, and from its narrow resources con- 
tributed large sums to maintain the hapless strangers. The 
Catholics looked upon it with singular aversion. The inhu- 
man saint, Francis de Sales, had in vain called out for its de- 
struction. "All the enterprises," he exclaimed, "undertaken 
against the Holy See and the Catholic prince have their be- 
ginning at Geneva."( 2 ) To destroy Geneva, he thought, would 
dissipate heresy. But Holland, Prussia, and at length England, 
were scarcely less active, and in every part of Protestant Eu- 
rope the industrious Huguenots planted the germs of prosper- 
ity and reform. Huguenots filled the army with which Wil- 
liam of Orange invaded England ; they fought in the campaigns 
of Marlborough, and aided in bringing to shame the last days of 
their persecutor, Louis. They wandered to America, and found- 
ed prosperous settlements in New York and South Carolina. 

A Protestant seigneur, Dumont de Bostaquet, has described 
the sufferings of a noble Huguenot family in the reign of Lou- 
is XIV. His ancestral chateau stood amidst the richest fields 
of Normandy. ( 3 ) Around it on all sides spread out the wide 

(*) Smiles, Huguenots. 

( 2 ) Vie de St. Francois de Sales, Lyons, 1633, pp. 120, 121. 

( 3 ) M6moires ine'dites de Dumont de Bostaquet, Paris, 1864. These 
memoirs were preserved by the author's descendauts, and have but lately 
been published. 



288 THE VAUDOIS. 

and splendid domain of his ancient race. The chateau was 
adorned with costly hangings and the rarest furniture ; its 
pleasure-grounds and gardens sloped gradually away and were 
lost in a girdle of woodlands. His plate was of great value ; 
his stable filled with horses of unrivaled speed; his gilded 
coach, attended by outriders and musketeers, was conspicuous 
at the gatherings of the provincial nobility of Normandy. 

For thirty years the life of the Protestant lord had glided 
on in opulence and ease ; a family of sons and daughters had 
grown up around him, gifted, intelligent, refined ; and his 
stately chateau was often the scene of masks and gay carous- 
als. It does not seem that the Huguenot chiefs were marked 
by any puritanic austerity. The family at Bostaquet were 
fond of merry entertainments and Christmas revels ; the hunt- 
ing-horn often sounded through their broad domains; and 
young ladies, queens of the chase, gave the last blow to the 
panting stag. The chateau resounded with mirth and gallant- 
ry, with music, dance, and song ; and the Protestants mingled 
without distinction with their Roman Catholic neighbors. 

At length, in 1687, the storm of persecution broke over the 
quiet scenes of Normandy ; a line of dragoons surrounded the 
Protestant district ; each avenue of escape was closed ; and 
the alternative was offered to every heretic of recantation or 
imprisonment, and perhaps death. The dragoons committed 
the most horrible atrocities ; the Huguenot chateaux were 
sacked and burned ; the noblest families were often treated 
with barbarous indignities until they accepted the Romish 
faith. Bostaquet at first yielded to the powerful temptation. 
He looked, perhaps, on his wife and happy children ; on his 
fair estate he had so loved to enlarge ; on his pleasure-grounds 
and gardens, planted under his care; on the scenes of his 
youth and his ancestral home ; and obeyed the commands of 
the persecutors. For the first time in the chateau of Bosta- 
quet the priest and the Jesuit ruled unrestrained, and the 
unhappy family were even compelled to attend mass.Q But 

( x ) The Jesuits were always the leaders in all the worst persecutions. 
M6moires d'un Protestant condamue" aux Galeres, p. 3 : " Les Je'suites et les 
pretres — ces impitoyables et acharn^s perse"cuteurs." 



TEE SEIGNEUR BOSTAQUET. 289 

conscience awoke ; the saddened countenances of the seigneur 
and his sons and daughters showed their abhorrence of the 
feigned conversion ; and parents and children watched for the 
happy moment when, abandoning their home and ancestral 
lands, they might escape, impoverished exiles, to England. 

One fair summer day, from the ancient chateau set out a 
band of pilgrims, on whom rested the radiance of a perfect 
faith. At the head went the Seigneur Bostaquet ; his moth- 
er, eighty years old, rode by his side, and was the most ardent 
of all the pious company ; his sons and daughters, of various 
ages, followed ; many friends and fugitives joined the caval- 
cade as they made their way to the sea-coast. The evening 
was charming; the moon shone bright and full; the emi- 
grants moved on cheerfully in the cool night air, and rejoiced 
at the prospect of the sea. The old lady of eighty, with her 
daughters and her grandchildren, sat on the shingle of the 
beach watching beneath the moonlight for the ship that was 
to carry her away forever from her native land. 

A loud outcry arose, and a band of robbers, or coast-guards, 
attacked the unprotected Huguenots. Bostaquet and his 
friends seized their pistols, and drove off their assailants. 
But they soon came back ; Bostaquet was wounded, and was 
forced to abandon his family and ride for life toward the 
frontier. Accompanied by a friend, he made his way over 
the hostile country, often aided, however, by generous Cath- 
olics; crossed mountains, woods, and rivers, and reached at 
length the shelter of friendly Holland. The ladies on the 
beach were seized by the coast-guard and shut up in convents, 
from whence they afterward escaped to England. Bostaquet's 
large estates were confiscated, his servants sent to the gal- 
leys, his family ruined ; but he distinguished himself as an 
officer in the army of William III., and lived prosperously for 
many years in Ireland. 

A yet more dreadful fate than loss of home and country 
awaited those unlucky Huguenots who were arrested in their 
efforts to escape.Q They were condemned at once to the gal- 

O De Felice, p. 337. 
19 



290 THE HUGUENOTS. 

leys. The French galleys were vessels usually a hundred and 
fifty feet long and forty wide. They were employed to guard 
the coasts, and sometimes to attack English cruisers that ap- 
proached the shore. Along each side of the galley ran a 
bench or seat, to which the slaves were fastened by an iron 
chain around one leg, and of sufficient length to allow them 
to sleep on the deck beneath. Here they remained night and 
day, exposed to the torrid heat or the winter's cold, half fed, 
and urged on by blows and imprecations in the painful task 
of pulling the heavy oars. In these floating dungeons, sur- 
rounded by convicts and criminals of the deepest guilt, the 
pure and gentle Huguenots sometimes continued for ten or 
twenty years, chained to the bench, or often died of exposure 
or the enemy's shot, and were flung ignominiously into the 
sea. Old men of seventy years or boys of fifteen or sixteen 
soon yielded to the fearful toil ; but others, more vigorous 
and mature, endured long years of torture, and were at last 
released at the instance of the Protestant powers. The cap- 
tains of the galleys usually treated their galley-slaves with 
barbarous severity. They scourged their bare backs to make 
them row with speed ; they threw them on the deck, and had 
them beaten for trivial faults. Emaciated, faint, and feeble, 
the poor slave often sunk beneath the blows and died, happy 
to escape from the intolerable torments inflicted by the state- 
ly and gracious Louis. 

But the most unsparing of their tormentors was usually the 
chaplain or priest of the galley.Q He was almost always a 
Jesuit. The disciples of Loyola were thought peculiarly fitted 
for this unattractive task. It seems to have been the duty of 
the chaplain to see that the Huguenots were not spared in 
any one of their sufferings, and to strive to induce them to 
recant by incessant cruelty and blows.Q Yet such was the 
wonderful constancy of these faithful martyrs that they chose 



C) Les Forcats pour la Foi, par A. Coquerel Fils, Paris, 1866. 

( 2 )M6moires d'un Protestant condamne" aux Galeres, p. 362. The mis- 
sionaries or disciples of St.Vincent de Paul seem to have been equally cru- 
el with the Jesuits. 



THE GALLEY-SLAVES. 291 

rather all the pains of their sad condition than to accept an 
idolatrous mass. With one word of recantation, they were 
offered a release from all their sufferings ; with one feigned 
submission, they might have been free. ~No promises moved 
them from their resolution ; no artful insinuations could de- 
ceive them into insincerity. "You must know," said Father 
Garcin, a priest, to the maimed and bleeding Marteilhe, who 
has left an account of his imprisonment — "you must perceive 
that the Church has no share in this matter. You are pun- 
ished for disobedience to the king." " But suppose," he re- 
plied, " we wish for time to reflect, could we not be set free ?" 
" By no means," said the priest ; " you shall never leave the 
galleys until you recant." And he ordered their torments to 
be redoubled. It was the Church that instigated the barbar- 
ity of the king.Q 

In the galleys might be seen for many years a sacred com- 
pany of the purest, the most refined, and the most intelligent 
of the French. The men who might have saved and reform- 
ed the nation were chained, in horrible torture, amidst robbers 
and assassins. Marolles, once counselor to the king, by the 
express order of Louis, was secured by a heavy chain around 
his neck, and compiled his "Discourse on Providence" while 
fastened to the oar.( 2 ) Huber, father of three illustrious sons, 
was also a galley-slave. The Baron De Caumont, at the age 
of seventy, labored with the rest. But few ministers of the 
reformed faith were found among the number, since, if capt- 
ured, they were usually put to death. More than a thousand 
Huguenots appear on the list of galley-slaves, and it is be- 
lieved that the real number has never been told. At length, 
in 1713, at the solicitation of Queen Anne, the sad remnant of 
the saintly band were set free from their tortures, and came, 
maimed and feeble, to Geneva. That noble and ever-honored 
city received the miserable exiles with fond congratulations 



( 1 ) Memoires d'un Protestant condamn^ aux Galeres, Paris, 1864, p. 362. 
" Ou peut voir," says Marteilhe, " parla le caractere diabolique de ces mis- 
sionnaires fourbes et cruels." 

( 2 ) Weiss, i., p. 100. 



292 TEE HUGUENOTS. 

and overflowing bounty. The magistrates, the clergy, and a 
large part of the population came out from the gates and wel- 
comed the galley-slaves as they approached the walls ; they 
were covered with honors and glad felicitations ; and every 
citizen took to his arms some one of the band of martyrs, and 
bore him proudly and fondly to the comfort and luxury of his 
Protestant home. With the flight of the Huguenots a gen- 
eral decay settled upon France, and in the last days of the per- 
secuting Louis his vain, aspiring nature was borne down by a 
thousand humiliations. No Protestant Turenne any more led 
on the French armies to victory ; no Huguenot Colbert saved, 
by careful economy, the resources of the nation. The best 
soldiers of France were fighting in the ranks of Marlborough 
and Eugene ; its rarest scholars — a Descartes, a Bayle, a Jurieu 
— spoke through the printing-presses of Leyden or Amster- 
dam ; its artisans had fled to England, Holland, and America ; 
its people were chiefly beggars.Q All over France, under the 
Catholic rule, men, women, children, fed on roots and grasses, 
and browsed with the beasts of the field. Paris became one 
vast alms-house, and it is estimated that, at the breaking-out of 
the Revolution, two hundred thousand paupers claimed char- 
ity from the hands of the king. The Jesuits alone flourished 
in the decaying nation, and ruled with dreadful tyranny over 
churches and schools, the prisons and the galleys. Literature 
declined ; the mental despotism of the Church gave rise at last 
to Voltaire, Rousseau, and the Encyclopedists ; the Jesuits were 
overthrown by the indignation of the age ; but their fall came 
too late to save from an unexampled convulsion that society 
which they had subjected only to corrupt.( 2 ) 

Under the rule of the Jesuits (1700-1764) the Huguenots 
who remained in France are still supposed to have numbered 
nearly a million. But they were no longer that bold and vig- 
orous race who, in the sixteenth century, had nearly purified 
the nation. The Jesuits watched them with restless vigi- 

(*) Le Detail de la France, 1695, Archives Curieuses, has a clear account 
of the embarrassments of trade, p. 311. 

( 2 ) Weiss, i., p. 100, describes the depopulation of France. 



THE " CHURCH IN THE DESERT." 293 

lance.Q They were forced to hide their opinions in cautious 
silence, to study the Scriptures at the peril of death. Yet 
they still maintained their church organization in secret, and 
elders, deacons, and evangelists still held their yearly meetings 
in lonely places, sheltered by the forest or the cave. The re- 
ligious services of the Huguenots were held with equal diffi- 
culty and danger. Driven from the cities and public places, 
the devoted people would wander to the utter solitude of some 
unfrequented woods, or gather in great throngs beneath a fis- 
sure in the rock. Sometimes at night they assembled on the 
sea-shore, or climbed among inaccessible hills, where no hostile 
eye could follow.Q The Huguenots were noted among the 
Catholics for their love of solitary places, and their sect was 
called the "Church in the Desert." Here, in the heart of 
rocks and wilds, they ventured once more to chant the Psalms 
of Marot, and heard the plaintive eloquence of their persecu- 
ted preachers with fond and eager attention. Yet often the 
Jesuits pursued them to their retreats with malignant eyes, 
and broke in upon them in the midst of their supplications.( 3 ) 
It was the favorite occupation of the active disciples of Loy- 
ola to follow the Church to its home in the desert, and bring 
to justice the bold criminals who still refused to worship at 
the shrine of Mary ; they were still resolved to extirpate ev- 
ery trace of heresy in France. Eighteen Huguenot pastors 
were executed or burned in the reign of Louis XY. ; their dy- 
ing voices were often hushed in a loud beating of drums. The 
galleys and the prisons were still filled with reformers ; some 
perished, forgotten, in lonely dungeons ; some died in chains 
or torture. The Jesuits, who knew the power of books and of 
the press, strove to destroy every trace of Protestant literature 
or libraries ; they would have read throughout all France only 
history as sanctioned by the Popes, or morals as treated by the 
casuists ; a decree was issued (1727) ordering all " new con- 



C) Martin, Hist. France, xviii., p. 19. 

( 2 ) Hist, des figlises du De"sert, C. Coquerel. 

( 3 ) Martin, Hist. Fran., xviii., p. 21. Sometimes the Huguenots turned 
upon their persecutors and killed a Jesuit. 



294 THE HUGUENOTS. 

verts " to give up their Protestant books ; in every town and 
village of France bonfires were fed with Bibles and Testa- 
ments, or other "pernicious" treatises ;Q the reformed libra- 
ries were wholly destroyed ; and the Huguenots, once the most 
learned of their contemporaries, sunk low in mental culture. 
The French intellect was fed on the brilliant sophisms of 
Kousseau, the sharp diatribes of Voltaire, the historical fables 
of Bossuet and the Jesuit fathers. 

One of the latest and most remarkable of the scenes of 
Romish tyranny in France was the tragedy of Jean Calas. 
In the Holy City of Toulouse, in the year 1761, still lingered 
a few heretics, distinguished for their peaceful lives and spot- 
less morals. Yet to their Catholic neighbors they were ever 
objects of suspicion and dislike. Toulouse, indeed, had long 
been renowned for its rancorous bigotry. It was called the 
Holy City because in one of its crypts might be seen the skel- 
etons of seven of the apostles, and in its bosom the cruel Saint 
Dominic had first conceived or applied the machinery of his 
Holy Inquisition. The spirit of Dominic ruled over the peo- 
ple, and Toulouse had been hallowed, in the eyes of Popes 
and Jesuits, by several massacres of the Huguenots seldom 
equaled in savage cruelty. In 1562, a Protestant funeral pro- 
cession was passing timidly through its streets ; it was as- 
sailed by an angry band of Catholics ; a general slaughter 
of the heretics followed, and three thousand men, women, and 
children were torn to pieces by their Romish neighbors. The 
Pope, Pius IV., applauded the holy act ; an annual fete was 
instituted in honor of the signal victory ; and every year, un- 
til 1762, a magnificent spectacle, attended by the blessings 
and the indulgences of successive Popes, kept alive the rage 
of bigotry and inspired the thirst for blood. ( 2 ) 

Jean Calas, a quiet Protestant merchant, lived (1761) among 
this dangerous population.( a ) He was sixty -three years old, 

(*) Smiles, Huguenots, p. 342, and note. 

( 2 ) Histoire de Toulouse, Aldeguier, iv., p. 315. 

( 3 ) Jean Calas, et sa Famille, Paris, 1858, par Athanase Coquerel Fils. 
M. Coquerel has done valuable service to the cause of historical truth by 
his various researches among the Huguenot annals. 



JEAN GALAS. 295 

respected for his honesty and his modest character ; with his 
wife, six children, and one maid-servant, a Catholic, he lived 
over his shop, which stood on one of the best streets of the 
city. He had four sons and two daughters, and the eldest of 
his sons, Marc-Antoine, the cause of the ruin of his family, 
was now about twenty-six. He was a moody, indolent, and 
unhappy young man, who had sought admission to the bar, 
and been rejected because he was a heretic. He had sunk 
into melancholy in consequence, and had apparently medi- 
tated suicide. Yet in October, 1761, no shadow of gloom 
rested on the innocent family. It was evening. The shop 
was closed and barred ; a visitor came in, and the Huguenot 
family gathered round their modest supper-table and passed 
the evening in cheerful conversation. Meantime, Marc-An- 
toine left the table to go below. " Are you cold, monsieur ?" 
said the servant to him. "~No" he answered; "I am burn- 
ing with heat." He passed on and went down-stairs. About 
ten o'clock the younger son, Pierre, went to conduct their vis- 
itor to the door, and found his brother suspended by a cord, 
and quite dead. He had hanged himself. 

The father, stricken with grief, took the body of his son 
in his arms ; a physician was called, who could do nothing ; 
an irreparable woe had fallen on the gentle household ; the 
mother wept over her first - born.Q But common sorrows 
were not to suffice for the fated family, and a dreadful big- 
otry was to make their names renowned over Europe and in 
history. A curious crowd gathered around the barred door 
of the shop, and a suspicion arose among the Catholics that 
the Calas family had put their son to death to prevent him 
from abjuring his faith. The wild fancy grew into a certain- 
ty ; the papists broke into the shop ; the father, mother, the 
son, and the servant were arrested and hurried to a close 
confinement ; the Church, the Government, and the people of 
Toulouse assumed their guilt ; and the dead Marc - Antoine, 
a Protestant and a suicide, was buried in solemn pomp as a 
martyr, attended by all the clergy of the city, followed by a 

( : ) Histoire de Toulouse, Ald^guier, iv. 7 p. 297-302. 



296 THE HUGUENOTS. 

vast and splendid procession, and covered with all the honors 
and blessings of the Roman Church. 

All Toulouse, now mad with religious hatred, called for the 
punishment of the Calas family. Q It was asserted that all 
Protestants were assassins; that they made away invariably 
with their children, if necessary, to prevent their conversion 
to the Romish faith. It was believed that the whole Calas 
family had been engaged in the murder of Marc-Antoine ; 
that father, mother, his brothers, and even the sisters, had 
united in the secret immolation. Jean Calas, after a long 
process, was tried and convicted. But no evidence of any val- 
ue had been produced against him, and his own clear proofs 
of his innocence were excluded by a fanatical court. The 
maid-servant, a Catholic, who could have shown that he was 
absent from the room where the fatal event occurred, was 
never suffered to be examined. Calas appealed to the Parlia- 
ment of Toulouse ; the Church ruled over the highest tribu- 
nal, and Calas was sentenced to a horrible death. He died on 
the rack, still declaring his innocence. " Wretch," cried one of 
his persecutors to him as he lay in torture, " you have but a 
moment to live. Confess the truth." Calas, unable to speak, 
made a sign of refusal, and the executioner drew the cord 
around his neck. 

But all Europe soon rang with the barbarous deed.( 2 ) Vol- 
taire took up the cause of the Calas family ; friends at court 
aided in reversing the judgment of the fanatics of Toulouse. 
In vain the whole Roman Church assumed the defense of the 
murderers of Calas, or Dillon, the Irish Archbishop of Tou- 
louse, showered indulgences and honors on the guilty counsel- 
ors : public opinion for the first time in France condemned 
persecution, and the corrupt Church trembled before it. Rose 
Calas, the widow, the bereaved mother, the most unfortunate 
of women, went up to Paris, and was received with sympa- 



(*) Hist, de Toulouse, iv., p. 307 : " Tout ce que pouvait 6tre (lit a la 
charge de la faraille Protestante," etc. 

( 2 ) De Felice, p. 428. Rochette and three companions were executed at 
Toulouse the same year. 



THE REVOLUTION. 297 

thetic attention by the court and the king ; a new trial was 
ordered ; the innocence of the Galas family was shown by 
conclusive proof ; the judgment was reversed, and a late jus- 
tice was done to the unhappy Huguenots. Yet the Catholic 
Church, confident in its infallibility, never abandoned its belief 
in the guilt of its victims, and its falsified manuals of history 
will continue to assert that JVIare-Antoine Calas was a martyr 
for the faith as long as the papacy endures. 

The Revolution soon followed, and the example of persecu- 
tion which the clergy of France had exhibited for so many 
ages was now retorted upon them with signal vigor. The 
scaffolds ran red with the blood of the priests. The galleys 
and the prisons, once crowded with Huguenots, were now filled 
with their persecutors. Chained to the bench and toiling at 
the oar. the Roman Catholic clergy experienced all those woes 
their Church had so freely inflicted on the gentle heretics. A 
general emigration of priests and nobles took place. France 
lost, for a time, a large proportion of its people ; yet it is im- 
possible not to be struck with the unimportant effect of this 
later emigration compared with that wide scene of disaster 
and national decay that followed the flight of the Huguenots. 
When the gay nobles and the corrupt clergy crossed the front- 
iers no flourishing manufacturing cities fell into decay; no 
fertile districts returned to their native wildness ; no intellect- 
ual dullness or moral decline succeeded a period of unwonted 
progress. It is probable, it is certain, that the destruction of a 
single centre of industry and trade by the intrigues of the Jes- 
uits under Louis XIV. — the exile of its pious artisans and 
their well-trained families — was more injurious to France than 
the expulsion of all its nobility and the fall of its monarchy and 
its Church. In the one case, it lost a centre of moral advance ; 
in the other, only the sources of religious and political decay. 

Under Napoleon the Huguenots experienced the toleration 
of a despot ; at the Restoration they became nominally free. 
They were no longer forced to worship in caves and deserts. 
The last massacre and persecution occurred at Nimes in lSlS.Q 

O De Felice, p. 478. 



298 THE HUGUENOTS. 

But the Catholic powers of France and the Popes of Kome 
have never ceased to oppress by ingenious devices the rising 
intellect of the reformers. The Bourbons strove to suppress 
the dissidents ;( x ) even Louis Philippe was forced, in obedience 
to the Bomish supremacy, to deny equal rights to his Protest- 
ant subjects. And in our own day( 2 ) a cloud of danger still 
hangs over the future of the Huguenots. France once more, 
as in the days of Louis XIV., has fallen under the control of 
the Jesuits.( 3 ) Slowly the society of Loyola has spread like 
a miasma over the land it so often desolated. The schools 
and colleges have been transferred to Jesuit teachers; the 
Protestant teachers are persecuted and trampled down. The 
Gallican Church has abandoned its feeble show of independ- 
ence, and is the strong defender of the persecuting faction at 
Kome ; the politics of France are, perhaps, controlled by the 
chief of the order of the Jesuits. A strange mental darkness 
is settling upon the nation, and in most of the French schools 
and colleges it is openly taught that Louis XI Y. was a mag- 
nanimous king; that the persecution of the Huguenots was a 
righteous act ; that, as the Jesuit Auger declared, or Bossuet 
and Massillon implied, it was " the angel of the Lord " that 
presided at the massacre of St. Bartholomew and directed the 
horrors of the dragonnades.( 4 ) 

O De Felice. 

( 2 ) J. Simon, La Liberte" de la Conscience, p. 217, shows that as late as 
1850 Protestant meetings were suppressed, Protestant schools broken up, 
by unjust laws. It is doubtful if things have improved since then. 

( 3 ) M. Athanase Coquerel thinks a new persecution impossible in France 
(Les Forcats, p. 142) ; yet he suggests a doubt (p. 143). If, as M. Jules Si- 
mon tells us, it is a criminal act to read the Bible to an assembly without 
permission from the Government (see La Liberty de la Conscience, p. 217), 
or to establish and maintain a Protestant school in a Catholic neighbor- 
hood, the Huguenots can scarcely be thought secure (see p. 218, note). 

( 4 ) The history authorized by the French Government and the Romish 
Church misrepresents all the leading facts in the religious wars. The mas- 
sacre of Vassy appears as a quarrel between the two religions ; the Duke 
of Guise is full of benevolence and honor! See Simple RCcits d'Histoire 
de France (1870), the State history for secondary schools, p. 141. The mas- 
sacre of St. Bartholomew is made to seem " un coup a l'ltalienne ;" the 
horrors of the reign of Louis XIV. are extenuated. 



PIUS IX. AND IRE HUGUENOTS. 299 

The Huguenots, therefore, are still in peril in their native 
land ; their ancient foes, the Jesuits, rule over the Church, and 
are plotting their destruction. An infallible Pope sits on the 
throne of St. Peter, who proclaims, as the direct revelation 
from heaven, the persecuting doctrines of Pius IV. and Pius 
V. ;Q who has himself filled the dungeons of Kome and Bolo- 
gna with the advocates of the Bible and of a free press. It is 
possible that France may prove the last battle-ground between 
the Jesuit and the reformer, the Bible and the Pope. It is 
certain that in such a struggle the printing-press will not be 
silent ; that the printer will still defy his natural foes ; that 
the public sentiment of the age will rise in defense of truth 
and honesty; and that the lessons of history will dissipate 
forever the lingering delusions of chivalry and of the Middle 
Ages.( a ) 

We have thus imperfectly reviewed the sad but instructive 
story of the Huguenots. The tale of heroism is always one 
of woe. Yet the impulse toward reform began at Meaux by 
Farel and Lefevre has never been lost, and the energy and 
the sufferings of their disciples have everywhere aided the 
progress of mankind. It would not be difficult to trace the 
beneficent influence of Huguenot ideas in the prosperity of 
England, Holland, America, or France. 

C) In a somewhat extensive work, by Professor Laurent, of Ghent, Le 
Catholicisme et la Religion de PAvenir, may be found a clear statement of 
the mediaeval tendencies of Rome. The Pope still threatens persecutiou, 
defies governments, annuls their acts, and only waits for an opportunity to 
destroy all his foes. See pp. 362, 411, 568, etc. 

( 2 ) At the congress of the Roman Catholic bishops of Germany, France, 
Belgium, and England, at Malines, in 1863, Archbishop Deschamps excused 
the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and defended persecution. No Roman 
Catholic dares denounce the Inquisition, or to relate true history. He is 
obliged to repeat the feeble ideas that flow from the diseased intellect of 
the Romish Propaganda. See Laurent, Catholicisme, p. 574, and book xi., 
on Traditional Religion. 



THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

In the first century of the Christian era the civilized world 
rested in unexampled peace. It was the most tranquil period 
Europe has ever known. No general war disturbed the pros- 
perity of Gaul, Italy, or the East ; no wide-spread revolution 
carried carnage and desolation to the populous provinces of 
imperial Home.Q It was a golden, autumnal season of classic 
civilization, when the ripened fruits of long years of material 
and mental progress were showered upon mankind, and when 
the internal decay of the mighty empire was hidden in its 
exterior and splendid tranquillity. Compared with the later 
centuries, the first was singularly frugal of human life. In 
the seventeenth century, all Europe was torn by fierce religious 
wars, and men died by myriads to gratify the fanatical malice 
of kings and priests. In the eighteenth, the obstinate vanity 
of a Louis, a Frederick, or a George III. covered land and sea 
with slaughter. In the dawn of the nineteenth, millions of 
the human race perished by the iron will of Napoleon ; and 
the young generations of Europe and America have seldom 
known any long repose from the dreadful duties of the camp. 
But in the first century no battle of civilized men occurred 
equal in importance to Sadowa ; no siege, except that of Jeru- 
salem, as destructive as that of Sebastopol. Under its im- 
perial masters, whether madmen, philosophers, or monsters, 
the Roman world almost forgot the art of warfare, and, weigh- 

(*) Under Augustus and Tiberius Italy was at peace, and their succes- 
sors were satisfied with distant conquests. The Vitellian wars filled Rome 
and Italy with massacres, but were soon terminated by Vespasian. Tacitus, 
Hist., iii., 72, laments the Capitol. From the Jewish war we must abate 
much of the exaggeration. 



ANCIENT CAPITALS. 301 

ed down by a general tyranny, gave itself languidly to the 
pursuits of peace. 

A magnificent form of civilization at once grew up. Men 
everywhere clustered together in cities, and surrounded them- 
selves with the countless appliances of a luxurious life. The 
theatre and amphitheatre, the aqueduct and bath, the grace- 
ful temples of yellow marble, the groves and gardens, the tri- 
umphal arches, the forums filled with statues and lined with 
colonnades, were repeated in all those centres of artistic taste 
that sprung up, under the fostering care of successive emper- 
ors, from the Csesarea of Palestine to the distant wilds of 
Britain or Gaul. The Roman empire embraced within its 
limits a chain of cities fairer than the proudest capitals of 
modern Europe — a series of municipalities destined to be- 
come the future centres of Christian thought. At the mouth 
of the venerable Nile stood Alexandria. Its population was 
nearly a million. It controlled the commerce of the world, 
and its vast fleets often covered the Mediterranean. It was 
the Paris of the East — gay, splendid, intellectual ; its univer- 
sity and its library, its philosophers and critics, filled the age 
with active speculation. Antioch, on the Syrian shore, still 
retained its prosperity and its luxurious charms. In the 
midst of its apocalyptic sisters, Ephesus glittered with artist- 
ic decorations, and maintained in all their magnificence the 
Temple and the ritual of Diana. Greece boasted the corrupt 
elegance of Corinth, the higher taste of incomparable Athens. 
Far to the west, Carthage had risen from its ruins to new im- 
portance. Spain was adorned with the temples and the aque- 
ducts of SaragossaQ and Cordova; the banks of the Rhine 
and the wilds of Gaul were sown with magnificent cities ; and 
the camps of Britain swiftly grew into populous capitals and 
peaceful homes. In the midst of the series of provincial 
towns stood conquering Rome, the mistress of them all, slowly 
gathering within her bosom the wealth, the luxury, the cor- 
ruption of the world. 

But of all the imperial cities the most wonderful was still 

( x ) Caesar Augusta. 



302 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM, 

Jerusalem.^) In a mysterious antiquity none of them could 
rival her. The towers of Salem had been contemporary with 
those of Belus or Semiramis, of the glory of Thebes and the 
youth of Memnon. Jerusalem had seen the splendors of her 
conquerors of Babylon and Egypt sink into decay. A thou- 
sand years had passed since David founded the city of Mount 
Zion, and still, in the first century, with a singular vitality, the 
holy site was covered with magnificent buildings, and a new 
Temple had risen on Mount Moriah to surpass the glory of 
that of Solomon. When the Seven Hills of Rome had been 
a desolate waste, and the Acropolis the retreat of shepherds — 
when all Europe was a wilderness, and savage hunters roamed 
over the site of its fairest cities, Jerusalem had shone over the 
East a beacon of light, and had observed, and perhaps guided, 
the progress of Italy and Greece. She had been often con- 
quered, but never subdued. More than once leveled to the 
ground, she had risen from her ashes.( 2 ) Eor a thousand years 
the priests had chanted the Psalms of David from Mount Mo- 
riah, unless in captivity or exile, and still the Jerusalem of 
Herod and Nero was, in her magnificent ritual and her sacred 
pomp, the rival and the peer of Athens and Rome. 

In the minds of her contemporaries^) the Jewish capital 
seems to have excited an intense dislike. The Jews were 
noted for their bigotry and their national pride.( 4 ) Even in 
their captivity they despised their conquerors; they turned 
with contempt from the polished Greeks and Romans, and re- 
fused to mingle with them as equals or as friends. To the 
austere Pharisee a Cicero or an Atticus was a pariah and an 

(*) Tacitus, Hist., v., 8 : " Hierosolyma genti caput. Illic immensae op- 
ulentise templuin." He sketches imperfectly the history of the famous 
city. " Dum Assyrios penes Medosque et Persas Oriens fuit despectissima 
pars servientium." See Josephus, Ant., vii., 3, 2. 

( 2 ) Josephus, Ant., x., 10 ; xii., 5, 3. Under Antiochus the finest buildings 
were burned, the Temple pillaged. 

( 3 ) Tacitus, Hist., v., 5, recalls this feeling : "Ad versus omnes alios hostile 
odium." 

( 4 ) Cicero, Pro L. Flacco, 28 : " Quod in tarn suspiciosa ac maledica civi- 
tate," etc. He speaks of their barbarous superstition, and argues like an 
advocate. 



THE HOLY CITY. 303 

outcast, and the chosen people, as far as possible, shrunk from 
the unholy society of the Gentile. But this exclusiveness 
seemed to their cultivated contemporaries barbarous and rude ; 
they repaid it by a shower of ridicule and sarcasm. The Bo- 
man writers, from Cicero to Tacitus, paint the Jews as the de- 
graded victims of a cruel superstition. The Roman satirist 
accused them of worshiping the empty air or the passing 
cloud ;(') the people of Rome, of adoring the vilest of ani- 
mals ;( 2 ) and no author of that intellectual age had discovered 
that the lyrics of the Jewish king were more sublime than 
those of Pindar ; that the conflicts and the trials of a human 
soul were nobler themes than the Olympic sports or the tri- 
umphs of Hiero. No Koman writer had studied with care 
the Jewish Scriptures, or had contrasted the Sibylline oracles 
with the prophecies of Isaiah. 

Yet even to the Greeks and Romans a mysterious awe in- 
vested the Holy City. They heard with wonder of that inner 
shrine where no image of a deity was seen, but within which 
no profane eye was allowed to gaze ; of the golden candle- 
stick, the priceless veil ; of the pompous worship of an invisi- 
ble God.Q They knew that to the austere Jew the fairest 
statues of Phidias, the most glorious representations of Jupi- 
ter and Apollo, were only an abomination. They had learn- 
ed that the despised Israelites were looking forward to the ad- 
vent of a prophetic Messiah whose reign should be universal, 
and who should subject all nations to his sway ; and emperors 
and kings had been startled and roused to cruelty by their un- 
flinching faith. But no heathen writer could have supposed 
that the promised Messiah was to be a God of boundless love ;( 4 ) 
that from the heart of the abject and hated race was to come 
forth a generous sympathy for the suffering and the sad of 

(*) Juvenal, Sat., xiv., 100 et seq. : "Nil prgeter nubes et cceli numen ado- 
rant." 

( 2 ) Tertullian, Apol., cxvi : "Petronius et porcinum numen adoret." 

( 3 ) Tacitus, Hist., v., 9. 

( 4 ) Unless we trace the prophecy of Virgil to a Jewish source. The 
harsher traits of Judaism were well known to the Romans. See Martial, 
v., 29 ; xi., 95. Persins, Sat., v., 180. Ovid, De Arte Am., i., 76, 416. 



304: THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

every land; that from mysterious Jerusalem was to descend 
upon the world a faith that taught the common brotherhood 
of man, a charity as limitless as its celestial source. 

This remarkable mental revolution took place within the 
first century. In a brief period Jerusalem was transformed 
from a centre of bigotry and intolerance to become the joy 
and hope of nations. The Church of Christ arose. Scarcely 
thirty-five years elapsed from the death of the Divine Teacher 
until the final ruin of the Holy City ; yet in those few years 
grew up a society of inspired missionaries, equal in power, in 
gifts and grace, who carried the tidings of hope and faith to 
the distant capitals of heathendom. The Church of Jerusa- 
lem, the Church of Christianity, was formed upon the sim- 
plest and most natural plan. Its affairs were discussed and 
determined in a general assembly of all the faithful. It knew 
no earthly master, acknowledged no temporal head. The 
apostles themselves, full of humility and love, yielded to each 
other's opinions, and consented to be bound by the decisions 
of their own body or of the united Church. Q Peter, whose 
vigorous faith formed for a time the chief support of his com- 
panions, was sometimes governed by the Hebraic impulses of 
the austere James, and was afterward softened by the gener- 
ous remonstrances of Paul. James himself, the brother of the 
Lord,( 2 ) at the apostolic council urged compromise and peace. 
The apostles laid no claim to infallibility ; they trembled lest 
they themselves might become castaways. The Church was 
a true republic, in which, in his unaffected humility, no man 
sought authority over another, and where all were equal in a 
common faith, an overpowering love. Its ritual was the nat- 
ural impulse of a believing heart. The Christians met in pri- 
vate rooms or on the flat tops of houses, and joined at regular 
intervals in prayer and praise. The sermon of the presbyter 
and the apostle was usually unpremeditated, and pointed to 

( x ) Clem. Roman., about 97, disapproves of the people removing blame- 
less presbyters. First Epistle to Corinthians, c. xliv. 

( 2 ) James is called "the brother of the Lord" in the Scriptures; tradi- 
tion has sought to make him a cousin. See article Brothers, in M'Cliutock 
aud Strong's Biblical Cyclopaedia.. 



SCEXES ABOUND JERUSALEM. 305 

the sacrifice of Calvary. [No painted robes, no gorgeous rites, 
no pagan censers or chanting priests, disturbed the season of 
divine communion. The commemoration of the last sad sup- 
per was performed by carrying the bread and wine from house 
to house ; and when the inspired missionaries set out, full of 
joy and faith, to bear their good tidings to splendid Antioch 
or gilded Ephesus, their dress was as plain as their Master's, 
their poverty as conspicuous as his. From Jerusalem, which 
had till now heaped only anathemas upon the Gentiles, the 
early Church descended, the teacher of self-denial, benevo- 
lence, and hope to man. 

The Holy City of the first century was not that scarred and 
stricken waste that now meets the traveler's eye.Q It was 
gay with palaces of marble and streets of costly houses ; with 
the homes of the wealthy Sadducees who had won their fort- 
unes in trading with Eastern lands, and of that priestly aristoc- 
racy who had engrossed the high offices of the Jewish Church. 
Above the deep ravines of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom the hill 
of Zion rose to the southward,( 2 ) covered with fine buildings 
and the palaces of its Idumsean kings. On the west and north 
the lower Acra was perhaps the home of the laboring class. 
Farther northward, the new suburb of Bezetha, which had 
grown up under . the successors of Herod the Great, was no 
doubt filled with the warehouses and the rich dwellings of the 
Jewish merchants. On the eastern precipice, that overhung 
the vale of Jehoshaphat and the brook of Kedron, stood that 
magnificent Temple which, to the impassioned Jew, seemed to 
surpass in splendor as in holiness every other earthly shrine. 
A tall and shapely building of pure white marble, seated on 
the high top of Mount Moriah,( 3 ) was the central fane where 
the Almighty was believed to dwell. It was seamed with 
golden plates, and covered by a roof of gilded spikes, lest the 
birds of the air might rest upon it. To the pilgrim afar off, 

(*) Robinson, Biblical Researches, i., p. 380 et seq. ; Tobler, Topographie 
von Jerusalem. 

( 2 ) Derenbourg, Essai sur l'Histoire et la Geographic de la Palestine, L, 
p. 154. 

( 3 ) Mischna, iii., 334. "Mons sedis erat quadratus." — De Mensuris Templi 

20 



306 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

on the north or east, it glittered in the bright sunlight of Ju- 
daea with an effulgence that seemed divine. Within were two 
chambers. One was that Holy of Holies into which no pro- 
fane eye was allowed to gaze. It was wreathed in rare work- 
manship of the purest gold ; and before its golden doors hung 
a veil, priceless in value, woven with the rarest skill of Jewish 
and Babylonian maids.Q The outer chamber contained the 
golden candlestick whose seven lamps were the seven planets ; 
the twelve loaves that marked the passing year ; the fragrant 
spices that declared the universal rule of God. Here, too, the 
walls and roof were covered with golden vines, and huge 
bunches of golden grapes hung on every side. The Jewish 
taste for costly ornaments lavished itself on the Holy House. ( 2 ) 
Its doors were of pure gold ; its whole front was covered by 
immense plates of gold ; at the entrance hung a second veil 
of Babylonian workmanship, embroidered with mystical de- 
vices in scarlet, purple, or blue. 

Such was the Holy House, the earthly resting-place of Him 
who had thundered from Sinai or spoken by the prophets. 
The approach to it was through a succession of magnificent 
terraces.^ ) Around the sacred precinct, at the foot of the hill, 
ran a wall of immense stones, wrought into each other, and 
embracing a circuit of several thousand feet. The inner side 
of the wall was a portico supported on huge pillars of mar- 
ble, beneath whose shelter the sellers of doves and the mon- 
ey - changers held a busy traffic. The whole area was called 
the Court of the Gentiles, and was the common resort of the 
Greek, the Roman, and the Jew. But within it, at the base 
of an ascending terrace, was drawn a graceful balustrade of 
stone-work, upon whose pillars was inscribed a warning that 
none but the pure Jew could pass, under pain of death. No 
Greek nor Roman might enter its exclusive barrier. Above 
it, a flight of steps led to a second court or square, surrounded 

OMischna^iii., 362. 

( 2 ) The Mischna is filled with details of golden ornaments and costly 
wood, iii., 362. 

( 3 ) It is impossible to reconcile the different accounts of the Temple in 
Josephus and the Mischua. I have therefore given a brief outline. 



THE CASTLE OF ANTONIA. 307 

by a magnificent wall. It was the outer sanctuary, and within 
was provided a separate place for women. Still higher rose 
a third court, with gates of gold and stones of costly work- 
manship, containing the altar from which the perpetual smoke 
curled up to heaven, and the Holy House with the candle- 
stick, and the Holy of Holies. 

To the north of the Temple, and joined to it by a bridge or 
stairs, stood that well-known tower upon which no Jew could 
look without a silent curse upon the Gentile. The Castle of 
Antonia was at once a palace, a prison, a fortress. Within its 
massive walls, that seem to have covered a wide surface, were 
inclosed a series of magnificent rooms, courts, barracks for sol- 
diers, and perhaps dungeons for the refractory Jew.Q Here 
St. Paul found shelter from the angry crowds of the Temple, 
and, by the care of the Roman captain, escaped the fate of 
Stephen. The tower was always guarded by a Eoman gar- 
rison ; its turrets overlooked the excited host of worshipers in 
the courts of the Temple below, and the glitter of foreign 
spears upon its impregnable walls reminded every Jew that 
the kingdom of David and Solomon was no more. The hill 
of Zion was profaned by a heathen master; the God of Ja- 
cob seemed abased before the idols of the Gentiles. 

Deep down below the eastern side of the Temple walls, the 
chasm or ravine of Jehoshaphat, a rift, apparently cloven by 
some fierce convulsion, separated the hill of Moriah from the 
Mount of 01ives.( 2 ) The head grew dizzy in looking down 
from the Temple walls into the bed of the Kedron. Yet the 
Mount of Olives was only a few hundred feet distant from 
the sacred precinct ; its sides were carefully cultivated, and be- 
longed, perhaps, to the wealthy priests ;( 3 ) from its top could 
be seen the city lying extended below ; and far to the east 
might be traced the glittering line of the Dead Sea.Q Along 

C) Josephus, De Bell. Jud., v., 5, 8. 

( 2 ) Robinson, Bib. Researches, i., p. 326. 

( 3 ) Derenbourg, i., p. 467. See Tobler, Topographic von Jerusalem, who 
quotes vol.ii., p. 987, La Citez de Jerusalem, a description written in 1187. 

( 4 ) Robinson, i., p. 349. "The waters of the Dead Sea lay bright and 
sparkling in the sunbeams." 



308 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

the side of the mountain spread the olive groves of the Garden 
of Gethsemane. Its peaceful walks were no doubt a favored 
retreat for the contemplative, the silent, and the sad. 

Peace and prosperity seemed once more within the walls of 
Zion. Its people, always industrious and frugal, were advan- 
cing in wealth and ease. Jerusalem was a hierarchical city, 
and resembled, upon an extensive scale, an English cathedral 
town.Q Its topics of conversation, its subjects of interest, 
were all religious. At the front of its society stood a few 
priestly families, possessed of great wealth and influence, who 
engrossed the chief offices of the Church. Ananias, Caiaphas, 
and Eleazer were the leaders of a narrow aristocracy distin- 
guished for its bigotry and pride, its luxury and pomp. The 
splendor of their dress and their wasteful extravagance are no- 
ticed with severity in the Talmuds. Of Ismael ben Phabi it is 
related that he wore but once a magnificent robe worked for 
him by his mother, and then gave it to an attendant. Eleazer 
had one so splendid and so transparent that his colleagues re- 
fused to allow him to use it.( 2 ) The priests feasted together at 
costly banquets, and lavished their wealth in pompous ceremo- 
nials and useless display. A congregation of priests and doc- 
tors of the law governed the city.Q It was called the Sanhe- 
drim, or the Seventy, and its intolerance and cruelty were felt 
by all the apostles. It was a high-priest who ordered Paul to 
be smitten in the face ; it was to the corrupt and fallen church- 
man that the apostle cried out, " Thou whited sepulchre !" 

The city was filled with a busy and prosperous popula- 
tion. Every Jew was taught in his youth some useful trade. 
The perpetuity of the race is due in great part to its habits 
of industry and frugality. Amidst the crowds that filled the 
shops and warehouses and the quiet homes of Jerusalem were 
seen the wealthy Sadducee, to whom the present life seemed 
the end of all ; the austere and formal Pharisee, who practiced 
the minute requirements of the law ; the Jew from Alexan- 
dria or Csesarea, softened by the contact of Greek philosophy ; 

(*) Derenbourg, with the aid of the Talmud, has given new light upon 
the condition of Jerusalem, i., p. 140. 

( 2 ) Derenbourg, i., p. 232. ( 3 ) Id., i., p. 141. 



THE HOME OF MARY. 309 

the wild Idumsean ; and the fanatical zealot. When the great 
paschal feast called the faithful to the Temple, its wide area 
was filled with the united descendants of Benjamin and Ju- 
dah, and a fierce religious excitement ruled in the sacred city 
that the Koman garrison itself could scarcely restrain. It was 
often a period of tumult and disorder. Strong patriotic im- 
pulses stirred the fanatical multitude. The children of Israel, 
gathered in their holy seat, saw before them the habitation 
of the Most High, and in His strength fancied themselves in- 
vincible. 

To the eye of History twelve sad yet hopeful men, charged 
with a heavy task, stand out distinctly amidst the busy throngs 
of Jerusalem. The bold and ardent Peter, the fond and ten- 
der John, the faithful James, led back their companions to 
the beautiful city.Q They wandered together through the 
crowded streets ; they preached in friendly houses ; they met 
often in the Temple to pray. They were Jews, and they had 
resolved that Jerusalem should be the centre of that wide re- 
ligious reform which they felt was to flow from their teaching. 
It was in the city of David rather than of Romulus that the 
Christian Church was to find its model and its source.( 2 ) In 
some plain house belonging to the mother of John lived the 
Holy Virgin, cherished, tradition relates, by him who had been 
the best beloved of her Divine Son, and by her whose bounty 
had often fed and clothed the houseless Saviour. Her chil- 
dren seem soon to have gathered around her. James, accord- 
ing to the spurious epistle of Ignatius,( 3 ) which, however, may 
retain some trace of legendary truth, resembled in appearance 
his Lord and brother. In character he was so eminently pure 
as to be known as James the Just. He lived in honorable 
poverty. He wore the plainest dress and fed on the simplest 
food. His name was renowned for perfect honesty and truth. 
He was a Hebrew of the strictest sect, and performed with 

(*) Acts i., 12. Neander, Kircheugeschichte, i., p. 329, describes the invis- 
ible church of Paul and James. The first epistle of Clement. Rom. may be 
looked at as showing the sentiment of his age. 

( 2 ) Acts i., 4. 

( 3 ) To St. John. See Hefele, Migne, v., p. 626 ; for an account of Ignatius. 



310 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

rigid care every requirement of the Jewish law.Q His knees 
grew callous from his constant attitude of prayer ; his heart 
was full of intense love for the departed Lord ; his life was 
spent in visiting the widow and the fatherless and in keeping 
himself unspotted from the world. It was natural, therefore, 
that the disciples should turn with unaffected reverence to the 
representative of the family of their Master, and James as- 
sumed the position of the head of the early Church. By later 
writers he is called bishop ; but no title or authority was an- 
nexed to his office.( 2 ) He was but an elder or adviser, counsel- 
ing the faithful in their difficulties, guiding the deliberations of 
the inspired assemblies, and leading his followers to a holy life. 
Around the home of the Virgin were probably assembled 
her younger children, the brethren and sisters of the Lord. 
But of them we hear nothing until after the martyrdom of 
James, when Simeon, his brother or his cousin, becomes his 
successor. Yet it is pleasant to fancy, with the old tradition, 
that Mary staid long in the house of the gentle John, that her 
last years were cheered by his constant care, and that she was 
able to bear witness to the world that all the marvels told of 
her Divine Son w r ere surpassed by the truth. In the spurious 
Ignatian epistles a letter of Mary is inserted. It is a reply to 
an invitation of Ignatius, the martyr bishop, to visit him at 
Antioch.( 3 ) Its simplicity and its purity might almost affirm 
its authenticity ; it has neither the superstition nor the gross- 
ness of the papal age. The Virgin gently assures the good 
bishop that all he had heard of Christ was true; that she 
would gladly visit him in company with John ; and exhorts 
him to stand fast in persecution. ( 4 ) The romance of the cor- 

( J ) Eusebius, H. E., ii., 23, quoting Hegesippus, Aia dkx eTai rr l v tKKXeaiav — 
6 aStXcpbg tov Kvpiov 'laKoifiog. 

( 2 ) Eusebius, ii., 1. The title is not Scriptural. 

( 3 ) Migne, Pat. Grsec. Migne's uncritical and partial collection should 
be read with caution, v., pp. 942, 943. Le Nourry, in his Prolegomena, and 
the Romish writers, reject these epistles, partly because Mary is called the 
mother of Jesus, and not of God. 

( 4 ) Migne, Pat. Graec, v., p. 943. She is made to say, " De Jesu quae a Jo- 
anne audisti et dedicisti, vera sunt." She calls herself " humilis ancilla 
Christi Jesu." 



ST. PETER. . 311 

respondence between Mary, John, Ignatius, seems to carry us 
back into some humble and happy home at Jerusalem, where, 
amidst the harsh strife of the corrupt city, a boundless purity, 
a limitless love, shed over its modest scene the peace of heaven. 
A frequent visitor at the house of John and Mary was no 
doubt the impetuous but true-hearted Peter. In history there 
are two St. Peters. One is the ambitious, the unscrupulous, 
the cruel, and tyrannical creation of the Church at Rome. Ev- 
ery unhallowed and worldly impulse was gradually numbered 
among the attributes of the great apostle. In the third cent- 
ury his Roman defamers began to invest him with an ambi- 
tious design of subjecting all other bishops. In the fifth, Leo 
openly demanded for him a universal primacy of authority 
that was denied both at Chalcedon and Constantinople. At a 
later period he was made a temporal prince, ruling over the 
Roman States by force and fraud. In the eleventh century 
the haughty Hildebrand, in the hallowed name of Peter, pro- 
claimed himself the temporal and spiritual master of the world. 
In the thirteenth, Innocent III., to enforce the authority of 
Rome, filled Europe with bloodshed, and exterminated the 
heretics of Provence. St. Peter was now made the author of 
the Inquisition, the champion of the Crusades, the oppressor 
of the humble, a universal persecutor. Still later, he was rep- 
resented by the horrible vices of a Borgia. At the Reforma- 
tion he was held up to mankind as the foe of rising knowledge, 
the patron of a dull conservatism. He was supposed to have 
inspired the bitter malevolence of the Council of Trent, and to 
have countenanced every crime of Charles V. or Philip II. 
In the nineteenth century, his name is once more invoked by 
the Bishop of Rome in exciting a new assault upon human 
freedom. Priests and Pope, in their final council, present once 
more to mankind their traditional St. Peter — ambitious, cruel, 
tyrannical — and declare his infallibility^ 1 ) 



(*) Baronius, Ann. Ecc, sees nothing but Peter in the early age, i., p. 283 : 
" Petrus a Christo primatu in omnes est auctus," etc. " Quidnain est, 
quod oculi omnium convertuntur in Petrum?" Within a brief period all 
eyes were turned on Paul. 



312 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

Very different was the true St. Peter of the Gospels and 
the Acts. He was ever lamenting his own fallibility. In a 
moment of terror, at the thought of death, he had denied his 
Saviour. On him the eye of affection had been turned re- 
proachfully ; to him had been spoken the words of indigna- 
tion, " Get thee behind me, Satan !" His fervent love had won 
forgiveness ; he was the rock on which the Church was built. 
Again he had denied his Master when he strove to enforce 
the Mosaic law on the followers of Christ ; again, he yielded, 
conscience-smitten, to the intercession of James and the fierce 
denunciation of St. Paul. At the sacred supper it was not 
Peter that leaned on the bosom of the Lord, and only his age 
and his rude eloquence gave him any precedence among the 
disciples. Often the first to act or speak, his advice was not 
always followed. To James the Just, to John and Peter, the 
Lord, after his resurrection, communicated a divine knowl- 
edge ;Q and Peter seems to have paid a willing deference to 
the family of his Master. 

His true greatness, his inspired eminence above mankind, 
lay in the humility with which he subdued his own impetuous 
nature, in the lessons of gentleness and purity which he so 
freely inculcates upon his disciples. To him the worship paid 
to a modern Pope must have seemed a shocking idolatry. " I 
am but a man," he cried to the Roman convert who would 
have adored him. He could scarcely have presided at an auto- 
da-fe, for his language is ever merciful and forbearing. For 
himself he disclaimed all superiority, and would be only an 
elder among elders. ( 2 ) Instead of the vicar of Christ, the lord 
of kings, the keeper of the sword of persecution, he would 
have all men humble themselves to one another. " Love as 
brethren," he cried; "be pitiful, be courteous, not rendering 
evil for evil." " God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to 
the humble."( 3 ) To such a nature the vain strife of contend- 

(*) Eusebins, H. E., ii., 1. So in the fragments of Papias, Andrew is 
named before Peter, iii., 39. 

( 2 ) 1 Peter v., 1. 

( 3 ) 1 Peter v., 5. So the epistles of Clement and Polycarp reflect the 
humility of the apostles. 



ST. JOHX. 313 

ing bishops, the pretensions of priests to spiritual and tem- 
poral despotism, the unhallowed splendors of the mediaeval 
Church, the horrors of the Inquisition and the massacres of the 
religious wars, the pride of a Hildebrand, the cruel rage of an 
Innocent III., must have seemed the orgies of evil spirits clad 
in a sacred robe. 

With St. Peter is constantly associated the gentler John. 
Together they had fished upon the Sea of Galilee, had left 
their nets at the call of the Master, and followed him in his 
wanderings through Judaea. Together they had beheld the 
crucifixion; together they had wept through the night of 
nights ; they had run together in the morning to the sepul- 
chre. But the tender love of the faithful John had urged him 
on swifter than Peter, and he had first seen that the stone was 
rolled away. Together they were to suffer imprisonment and 
persecution; preached in Samaria; performed miracles; and 
were at last parted to die in foreign lands and by a different 
death.Q St. John represents, if possible, a higher form of hu- 
man excellence than his ardent companion. The Saviour, we 
are told, loved him above all other men. In his boundless af- 
fection his Master had discovered no flaw ; on him the divine 
countenance had never turned reproachfully. St. John's life 
and writings are filled with that intense sentiment of tender- 
ness and compassion which is the soul of Christianity, and 
which was to flow in a full tide over the human race.( 2 ) 

His youth was apparently passed in active labor. He was 
a fisherman, like his father ; but he had inherited some prop- 
erty, and was possibly able to obtain a better education than 
fell to the lot of the other apostles. His writings show traces 
of an acquaintance with Greek philosophy. Of the other 
members of the sacred company scarcely any thing is told. 
Tradition has vainly striven to follow them in their missionary 
toils, and has sent them forth to found churches in India and 

C) Eusebius, H. E. 

( 2 ) Neander, Deukwiirdigkeiteu, Geschichtedes Christenthums, etc., i., p. 
399, has an instructive essay on Christian brotherhood. The Christians 
formed a united family ; they sent aid to each other everywhere — " bis 
nach den entferntsteu Gejrendeu." 



314 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

Ethiopia, in Britain or Gaul. They were all poor, plain men, 
yet it can not be inferred that they were wholly uneducated. 
Every Jew was usually taught to read, if not to write ; and 
the apostles, from their youth, had been familiar with the 
wonderful lyrics of David and the inspired precepts of the 
law. Their minds had been fed upon the solemn liturgy of 
the Temple ; they had heard the holy lessons chanted by the 
priests, and had listened to the wild strains of the lyre and the 
cymbals that accompanied the sacred rites. With music and 
poetry, therefore, they were not wholly unacquainted, and they 
had learned to watch the lovely changes of nature on the 
shores of Galilee. Here, Josephus tells us, was the brightest 
landscape of Judsea. In Galilee the sower trod the ever-fer- 
tile fields with joy ; the songs of the marriage feast and the 
cries of happy children were heard over the land; the lily 
trembled on its stalk more splendid than Solomon's glory; 
the olive and the vine poured forth their abundant fruit. Q 
But, above all, the disciples had heard lessons of divine wis- 
dom, and been instructed by parable, precept, example, by the 
Sermon on the Mount. 

Affrighted and dismayed by the spectacle of the crucifix- 
ion, the faithful eleven had fled from Jerusalem and betaken 
themselves to their nets.( 2 ) Recalled by the well-known voice 
of their risen Lord, they returned to the city, and met togeth- 
er in their plain lodging, the upper chamber, to found the in- 
fant church. Before them lay a heavy task. Through perse- 
cution and suffering, in poverty and weakness, they were to 
preach to all nations the lesson of heavenly peace ; they were 
to break down the mighty fabrics of formalism ; to blend into 
one Christian family the Gentile and the Jew. Yet never 
had the ruling religions of the world seemed more firmly 
established than when the apostles began their labors. In 
Jerusalem the fierce zeal of the Jews was aroused to new vig- 



(') Key, fitude de la Tribu de Juda, still finds magnificent groves of 
olives in Judaea (p. 19), and quotes the reverend Robinson often. Of 
Galilee, Josephus lias given a pleasing account, B. J., iii., 3. 

( 2 ) John xxi., 3 : u Simon Peter said, I go a-fishing." 



JEWISH FESTIVALS. 315 

or by the shame of a foreign rule.Q The presence of a Gen- 
tile master, the hostile spears of Antonia, deepened to a wild 
enthusiasm the ardor with which the assembled nation per- 
formed its devotions in the Temple, and kept with rigid mi- 
nuteness the strict requirements of the law. Never were the 
rites more splendid, the throngs of the festal seasons more 
numerous, than when, under the Roman procurators, the tribes 
gathered on the holy hill. A perpetual horror hung over the 
excited nation lest strangers might defile their Temple; a 
keen watch was kept over the sacred site ; and every Jew was 
prepared to lay down his life to save it from Gentile desecra- 
tion. ( 2 ) Pharisees and Sadducees united in this dreadful res- 
olution, and even the gentle Essenes were afterward found 
fighting in defense of their Temple and its God. 

Hatred for the Gentile had deepened the patriotic faith of 
the Jew, but had left his religion a corrupt formalism. The 
higher orders of the priests were noted for their pride and their 
rapacity. To maintain their luxurious splendor, they plunder- 
ed the people ; to confirm their power, they put to death their 
rivals. The Holy City was often startled by the news of an 
assassination or a murder, and frequently fierce tumults arose 
within the walls of the Temple itself, and dyed its sacred courts 
with blood. A general corruption of morals had followed the 
cruel reign of Herod and the Romans ; the Sadducees,( 3 ) rich, 
venal, and unscrupulous — the Pharisees, linked together in 
their unholy brotherhood, had filled Jerusalem with their vices 
aud their crimes; the poor were oppressed by usurers and 
cheated by forestallers ; and great wealth was seldom gained 
by honest means. Throughout the open country, robbers 
from the rocky caves of Lebanon preyed upon the industrious, 
and perhaps gave rise to the parable of the Good Samaritan. 
They were the zealots or patriots who had taken an oath nev- 
er to submit to the Roman rule, and who fled from the city 
to rocky fastnesses and hiding-places, whence they issued forth 

( : ) Raphall, Post-Biblical Hist., ii., 399 et seq. 

( 2 ) Josephus, B. J., ii., x., 4. Kaphall, ii., 399. 

( 3 ) Derenbourg, i., p. 143. See De Saulcy, Histoire d'Hdrod. 



316 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

at night to plunder equally the Roman, Samaritan, or Jew.Q 
Not seldom they made their way back to Jerusalem, and, min- 
gling with the people, stabbed some unlucky priest or wealthy 
citizen who had shown too great subservience to the Roman 
rule.( 2 ) 

In the most bigoted of cities the apostles were to preach a 
new faith; to their enraged and rebellious countrymen they 
were to teach lessons of tenderness toward the Roman and 
the Greek. But if they ventured to look beyond the limits 
of Judaea the prospect of religious reform seemed even less 
encouraging. Far before them spread that Gentile world of 
which they knew only by report, where for countless genera- 
tions the white-robed priests had celebrated the rites of Jupi- 
ter or Minerva, the gods of Homer and Pindar, of ^Eschylus 
and Ennius, in temples splendid with the offerings of the 
faithful and consecrated by an undoubting superstition. Un- 
learned and modest rustics, touched only by a sacred fire, they 
were commissioned to penetrate to Antioch and Ephesus, to 
Athens and Rome, and declare to hostile paganism the won- 
ders of the cross. But how could they hope to be believed? 
Never had the ancient faith seemed more firmly established. 
At its front stood the Roman emperor, the chief priest of the 
pagan world, the master of the lives and fortunes of his sub- 
jects, proclaiming his own infallibility, and announcing him- 
self to be a god. In the city of Rome, the central shrine of 
heathenism, beneath the golden roof of the Capitoline temple, 
the St. Peter's of antiquity, amidst the chant of choristers, the 
smoke of censers, the musical intonations of the stoled and 
mitred priests, a CaligulaQ or a Domitian was adored by his 
trembling subjects as the representative of deity on earth. 
No Bishop of Rome ever possessed a more imperious sway 
over the faith of mankind ; no Hildebrand or Innocent was 

O Raphall, ii., 365. 

( 2 ) Josephus, B. J., ii., 12, paints a dark picture of the horrors in the city 
at a later period. The Sicarii murdered men in the day-time, and then hid 
in the throng. They appeared in Herod's time. 

( 3 ) Suetonius, Calig., 22. See Merivale, H. R., v., 405. Caligula claimed 
an equality with Jove. 



BOM AN PAGANISM. 317 

ever more jealous of his spiritual rule, or persecuted with 
greater vigor the luckless heretic. Whoever denied the infal- 
libility of Caligula was condemned to the cross or the scourge, 
and the prudent cities of the Roman empire hastened to adore 
the statues of the imperial god. Nor was the splendor of the 
ancient ritual inferior to that of modern Rome. The one, in 
fact, is borrowed from the other. The Pontifex Maximus of 
the Capitoline temple has been transformed into the Pontifex 
Maximus of the Church of Rome ;(*) the rich robes and mitre 
of the ancient priest adorn the modern Pope ; the tapers and 
lighted lamps, the incense and the lustral water, the images 
glittering with gems and gold, the prayers, the genuflections, 
the musical responses, and the gay processions of the servants 
of the pagan temple have been preserved wherever the Ro- 
man faith is dominant, from Italy to Peru. 

It was against this imposing formalism, whose centre was 
ancient Rome, that the apostles were to wage incessant war, 
in poverty, humility, persecution, death. They were to strike 
down the imperial Pontifex Maximus, who claimed to be a 
god ; they were to drive the priests from the altar and ban- 
ish the glittering images, the unhallowed rites ; they were to 
preach, amidst the fearful corruptions of the age, a spotless 
purity ; to inculcate honesty, industry, humility, and love ; to 
prepare mankind for a better life. They met in an upper 
chamber in Jerusalem, elected Matthias in the place of Judas, 
by the suffrage of all the small band of Christians ; and then, 
in the heart of the hostile city, surrounded by the fanatical 
population of Pharisees and Sadducees, exposed to the dagger 
of the Sicarii and the rage of the Sanhedrim, began to speak 
of Him who had walked with them on the Sea of Galilee. 

Suddenly there spread through the city of David a wild re- 
ligious excitement, a revival more wonderful than prophet or 
priest had ever caused. The Spirit of God moved over the 



(*.) Muratori, Liturgia Romana Vetus, would trace the Roman ritual 
back to the apostles—" nulla autem dubitatio est, quin vel ipsis Apostolis 
viventibus aliquis fuerit Liturgise ;" but the supposition is unhistorical as 
well as unscriptural. See cap. i. ? 3 ; ii., 10. 



318 THE CHUBCR OF JERUSALEM. 

chosen people.Q The voices of the apostles, accompanied by 
miracles and prodigies, and telling the story of heavenly com- 
passion, melted the hearts of the penitent Jews. Immense 
congregations assembled aronnd the honse of the teachers, 
and professed their faith. Three thousand were converted in 
one day. The number of believers was constantly enlarged. 
The Jews of every land, who had come up to Jerusalem from 
their distant homes in Babylon or Alexandria, Syria and 
Greece, were filled with a novel fervor. The people of Je- 
rusalem of every rank yielded to the general impulse, and 
worshiped Him whom they had crucified. Priests, learned 
in the teachings of the rabbis, and weary of the empty 
formalism of the law, threw themselves at the apostles' feet. 
Wealthy citizens sold their lands and houses, and gave their 
possessions to the cause of Christ.( 2 ) A holy brotherhood, a 
congregation of saints, sprung up in the corrupt city; the 
meek and spotless Christian walked in the crowded streets 
teaching by his words and his example ;( 3 ) in many a hum- 
ble dwelling on the Acra or stately palace on the hill of Zion 
the sound of Christian prayer and praise was heard ; and all 
Jerusalem seemed ready to worship at the cross of Calvary. 

Thus, almost in a moment, the Church of Jerusalem and of 
Christ arose. It was about the year 35. Tiberius was on the 
throne of the world, and was hidden in his island fastness, 
hated by mankind. Within two years he was to die, and 
transmit his authority to Caligula. At Jerusalem the family 
of Herod the Great, always patronized by the Koman em- 
perors, still held a certain authority. Augustus and Tiberius, 
Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, each maintained a friendly in- 
tercourse with the Jewish kings. Herod the Great died in 
the first year of the century, just after the birth of Christ ; 
his son, Herod Antipas, succeeded him in a nominal rule over 
a part of Palestine, and reigned until perhaps the year 39.( 4 ) 

(*) Pressense", Le Premier Siecle, i., p. 347. 
C) Eusebius,H.E.,ii.,17. 

( 3 ) Epistle to Diognetus, cap. v., defines the Christian. He is to love all 
men : he is persecuted by all. 

( 4 ) Archelaus reigned a few years over Judaea. 



APOSTOLIC CHARITIES. 319 

Agrippa L, the grandson of Herod the Great, and the friend 
from childhood of the Emperor Caligula, next governed Ju- 
daea, from 41 until 44. His son, Agrippa II., was made king 
of Chalcis in 48. His little kingdom was afterward enlarged, 
but never embraced the province of Judsea nor the city of Je- 
rusalem. He survived the destruction of the sacred seat. 
During the whole apostolic period, therefore, the Holy City 
was under the direct control of officials appointed at Rome ; 
and it can hardly be doubted that the Roman court was con- 
stantly informed of the rapid progress of the new faith. 
From the doubtful letter of Pontius Pilate to Tiberius, and 
from the account of the trial of St. Paul, we may at least in- 
fer that so important a movement had not been neglected by 
the jealous despots of the Roman world ; and it seems proba- 
ble that no city of the empire was better known to Claudius 
and to Nero than the ancestral home of their friends Agrip- 
pa I. and II., the direct descendants of Herod the Great. Be- 
tween Jerusalem and Rome there was a constant intercourse. 

Meantime the missionary labors of the apostles went on 
unchecked. Full of joy and faith, they preached to increas- 
ing multitudes. Beneath the shadow of the stately Temple 
and the hostile vigilance of the bigoted Sanhedrim, the infant 
Church grew in strength, and shed a refining influence over 
the tumultuous city. One of its most pleasing traits was its 
ceaseless liberality to the poor. The widow and the orphan 
were visited and maintained at the cost of the community. 
No one was allowed to suffer for want ; and the apostles, en- 
grossed by the labor of teaching, were obliged to appoint sev- 
en assistants, afterward called deacons, who distributed alms. 
Presbyters or elders were also elected, at a later period, to re- 
lieve the first missionaries in their holy toil ; and with this 
simple organization the Church of Jerusalem was always con- 
tent.^) It possessed no bishop or Pope ; no Pontifex Maxi- 
mus or imperious head. The family of the Lord seem to 

(*) The presbyters were Jewish, the bishops or overseers of Gentile ori- 
gin. The term bishop was, therefore, not used at Jerusalem. The Church 
officers, whether bishops or presbyters, held their positions only during 
good conduct (First Ep. of Clement, cap. xliv), possibly only at will. 



320 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM, 

have held always a high place in the esteem of the common- 
wealth, as the natural inheritors of his primacy ; and James 
the Jnst deserved by his rare piety the first rank in the assem- 
blies of the faithful. Yet the first Christians still remained, 
in outward form, a sect of the Jews. The converts observed 
all the forms of the Mosaic law; the apostles went daily to 
the Temple to pray ; and even Paul himself, at a later period, 
submitted for a moment to the national observances. With 
their fellow-Jews the Christians climbed the stately terraces 
of the Temple, and worshiped within the sacred inclosure 
where no Gentile was allowed to come. 

They could not, however, escape the vigilance of the Sanhe- 
drim. In the first joy and promise of its wide success, the 
progress of the Church was arrested by the iron hand of per- 
secution. Peter and John, the most eminent teachers of the 
new faith, were seized and thrown into prison. They were 
set free by a miracle ; were forbidden to preach ; and were 
saved from a sudden death by the prudent counsel of Gama- 
liel. We may well conceive the deep excitement, the pro- 
found alarm, of the peaceful Church, when it was told from 
house to house that the two chiefs of the apostolic company 
had been shut up in the common jail, and the thrill of awe 
that followed their mysterious deliverance. Yet the apostles, 
full of inspired ardor, refused to obey the Sanhedrim. For 
persecution they were prepared, and the example of their 
Master was ever before them. Perhaps, in this hour of dan- 
ger, they wandered to Golgotha and the Mount of Calvary, 
recalled anew the awful scenery of the crucifixion, and saw 
above them the tender countenance crowned with its circlet of 
thorns. Perhaps they looked above the world to a glorified 
reign in heaven, and longed to stand at the right hand of the 
Saviour. But no terrors of persecution damped their ardor. 
Their voices were still heard above the fanatical tumult of 
Jerusalem, preaching in opposition to the rigid law the single 
doctrine of faith in the crucified Lord. " Believe," they cried 
to Sadducee and Pharisee, "and thou shalt be saved.'^ 1 ) 

( J ) So in Pastor Hernias, Vision 4, cap. i. : "A voice answered, 'Doubt 
not, O Hernias !' " 



THE MARTYR. 321 

The next phase in the history of the Church was martyr- 
dom. Q To Stephen, one of the seven almsgivers, belongs the 
first place in that countless company who have died for the 
faith in all the long centuries of persecution. Like Stephen, 
the victims of many an auto-da-fe have seen heaven open 
as they passed away ; like him, Huss and Jerome died with 
songs of joy. He seems to have been one of the most gift- 
ed of the early converts, and his vigorous eloquence aroused 
the intense hatred of the Sadducees and the Sanhedrim. His 
learning and a Greek education enabled him to dispute with 
Saul of Tarsus and the Cilicians, with the Jew of Alexandria 
and of Antioch. He made converts, no doubt, who carried 
into the pagan capitals the new revelation. He grew bold 
and vigorous in his assaults upon the Jewish law, and Sad- 
ducee and Pharisee felt that their authority with the people 
was passing away. They resolved to use violence in silencing 
the eloquent reformer. A wild and angry crowd gathered 
around the preacher; the scribes and elders seized and drag- 
ged him before the Great Council of Jerusalem, charging him 
with having uttered blasphemy against the holy law.( 2 ) The 
assembly met in one of the courts of the Temple, beneath the 
shadow of the Holy House ; no prudent Gamaliel restrained 
the fanaticism of its high-born and imperious members ; and 
among the fiercest of the accusers of Stephen was the gift- 
ed and yet unsanctified Paul. The trial of the first martyr 
recalls the long series of similar scenes in the annals of his 
successors. From the seats in the sacred hall looked down 
upon their victim an array of judges as bitter and as hostile 
as those who condemned the gentle Huss at Constance, and 
who sought the life of Luther at the Diet of Worms. The 
charge of blasphemy was preferred ; the high-priest said, "Are 
these things so?" Then, like Luther at Worms, or Jerome at 
Constance, Stephen broke forth in an impassioned argument 
for the truth of Christianity. He reviewed the story of his 

(*) Acta Martyrorum, Bollandus, i., 16 et seq. The fancied tales of mar- 
tyrdom at least agree in their leading traits. 
( 2 ) Acts vi. ; vii. 

21 



322 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

ancestral faith ; he charged the haughty priests, the high-born 
doctors, with having violated every precept of the law. " Which 
of the prophets," he cried, " did not your fathers persecute, and 
you have destroyed the Holy One ; you are the betrayers and 
the murderers of the Son of God." 

They gnashed on him with their teeth ; they were cut to 
the heart. A fierce clamor probably arose in the crowded 
council ; but Stephen, conscious of his doom, said, " I see the 
heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right 
hand of God." 

A loud outcry arose ; they stopped their ears. "With frantic 
rage, they dragged Stephen out of the city walls and stoned 
him to death. He called upon his Master ; he prayed, " Lay 
not this sin to their charge," and then fell asleep.( l ) 

This picture of the first martyrdom at Jerusalem, painted 
by the skillful touch of Luke, was ever before the minds of 
the early Christians, and animated them with a divine fervor. 
They, too, longed, like Stephen, to see heaven open, to win 
through the pains of martyrdom an immediate access to celes- 
tial bliss. As persecution deepened around them, and to em- 
brace the faith of Christ was become almost a certain pathway 
to torture and to death, the ranks of the martyrs were filled 
by countless willing victims, who sought instead of avoiding 
the terrible doom. The apostles looked forward gladly to the 
last great trial. James the Great and James the brother of 
the Lord died, like Stephen, at Jerusalem.( 2 ) Peter and Paul 
are said to have perished at Pome. Tradition awards a vio- 
lent death to nearly all the apostles. St. John is said to have 
been thrown into a vessel of boiling oil, to have passed through 
the ordeal unharmed, and, like Enoch, to have been finally 
translated. ( 3 ) The gallant Ignatius, the disciple of St. John, 
traveled cheerfully to Pome to be devoured by wild beasts, 
and longed for the moment when he should be torn to pieces 
by the teeth of the lions. He prayed that the wild beasts 
might become his tomb.( 4 ) His friend, Polycarp, gave thanks 

C) Acts vii., 60. ( 2 ) Eusebius, H. E.. ii., 23. ( 3 ) Id. 

( 4 ) Ignatius, Ep. to Romans, c. v. 



DISPERSION OF THE CHURCH. 323 

when he was bound to the stake.Q The passion for martyr- 
dom grew into a wild enthusiasm with the spread of persecu- 
tion; the Christians often besought the pagan judges to grant 
them the priceless boon ;( 2 ) parents educated their children to 
become martyrs, and then threw themselves in the way of 
death ; martyrdom descended in families, and the child thought 
himself an unworthy member of a saintly race did he not re- 
ceive the crown of his ancestors ; and when the Papal Church 
of the Middle Ages revived the pagan practice of persecution, 
the gentle Yaudois among their mountains, or the Calvinists 
of France and Holland, learned, from the example of the first 
martyr of the Church of Jerusalem, to die without a tear. 

A general dispersion of the Christians followed the death of 
Stephen. The persecutors broke into their houses and dragged 
them to prison. Jerusalem was filled with scenes of violence ; 
the happy Church, so lately rejoicing in prosperity and prog- 
ress, was dissolved ; the new converts fled, with their families, 
to Cyprus, to Antioch, or Alexandria, and, wherever they wan- 
dered, preached the Gospel to attentive hearers. Churches 
were founded in splendid cities by the humble missionaries, 
that afterward grew into metropolitan sees and haughty bish- 
oprics. Antioch owed its conversion to this sudden dispersion. 
It is not improbable that the Church of Rome may have been 
founded by some fugitive from Jerusalem. But while their 
people fled, preaching and baptizing in foreign lands, the 
apostles, and James, their moderator, still remained in the 
Holy City, resolved to maintain its pre-eminence as the centre 
of the Church. 

Yet from this period (36) the elder members of the Church 
of Jerusalem are almost lost to history. Peter and John ap- 
pear for a moment as missionaries to Samaria ; Peter converts 
a Gentile, and confounds a magician ; after a long silence the 
apostles re-appear at the council (50) ; they are then lost except 

C) Eusebius, H. E., iv., 15. 

( 2 ) The legends are often touching, often gross. See Bolland., i., 569. 
So in i., 16, the virgin martyr gives thanks : "Gratias ago tibi, Domine 
Deus, qui aucillam tuam in perfectione tuae instituisti." The story of St. 
Martina is repulsive. 



324: THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

in tradition; and they live and die in almost impenetrable 
obscurity. We must conclude, however, that they were seldom 
long absent from Jerusalem. In the sacred city they would 
find an audience of rare magnitude, ever changing with the 
varying seasons ; and when the Temple was filled with its mot- 
ley throng from foreign lands, they could spread the Gospel 
with little labor. They enlarged and strengthened the Church 
at Jerusalem ; they made missionary tours to Samaria, which 
lay north of Judaea ; they, no doubt, often crossed over it to 
their native Galilee, still fertile and prosperous, beyond ; they 
saw the well-known lake, and trod its peaceful shores. St. 
John is said to have lived at Jerusalem with the Virgin Mary 
until, in 48, she died ; and we may fancy that often the be- 
loved disciple and the gentle Mother wandered away from 
their fair house on Zion HillQ to the fertile environs of the 
city, gazed with chastened sorrow on Calvary, and paused un- 
der the olive groves of Gethsemane ; that James the Just was 
ever in the Temple at prayer, or visiting among the sick and 
the poor ; that Jude, Simeon, and the other younger brethren 
of the family of Christ had grown up to be useful members 
of the vigorous Church. Persecution seems to have in a 
measure ceased. The Roman rulers probably restrained the 
rage of the Sanhedrim. From Jerusalem, the centre of the 
ever-expanding limits of Christianity, the apostles watched over 
the various missionary stations in the pagan world, guided the 
ardent laborers in the fertile field, heard with joy of the wide 
success of the faith, and were won from their Jewish prejudices 
when they were told of the piety and humility of the Gentiles. 
One great name, eminent only in its lowliness, from this time 
overshadows and controls the Church of Jerusalem. Fierce, 
cruel, unsparing in his unsanctified state, Saul of Tarsus had 
disputed with vehemence against the eloquent Stephen, had 
consented to his death. ( 2 ) Among the eager populace who 

(*) Mcephorus, He. E., ii., 42, describes John's house as a fine one. John 
sold his estate in Galilee, according to the same writer, and bought the 
house on Mount Ziou. 

( 2 ) Couybeare aud Howson, St. Paul ; Neander, Planting of Christianity, 
i., p. 99 et seg. 



PAUL AT DAMASCUS. 325 

watched the fate of the holy martyr none was more malevo- 
lent than the Jew of Tarsus. He saw without a tear the woes 
he had occasioned ; he heard without a sigh the tender words 
of forgiveness ; an impenetrable veil hid from the world and 
from himself those nobler qualities that were yet to shine 
forth with surpassing lustre upon mankind. From the mur- 
der of Stephen, Saul proceeded to new excesses. He became 
the leader of that fierce persecution that broke out in Jerusa- 
lem. He forced his way into the Christian homes of the Be- 
zetha, or Mount Zion ; amidst the wail of women, the cry of 
little children, he dragged fathers and mothers to their doom ; 
he filled the prisons with his victims. When sated with per- 
secution at home, he hurried to Damascus, armed with letters 
from the high-priest and the Sanhedrim, to strike down the 
infant Church that had sprung up amidst the groves and gar- 
dens and the glittering waters of the fairest city of the East. 
The incarnation of the rigid law, of a Pharisaical formalism, 
of a cruelty not surpassed by an Alva or a Bonner, Saul trav- 
eled swiftly and sternly over the ancient road from Jerusalem 
to Damascus, dead to the fair face of gentle nature around 
him, to the beautiful and true in life, to the loveliness of virtue 
and of faith. A pride like that of Hildebrand, a cruelty like 
that of Innocent, a madness such as ever clouds the intellect 
of ambitious priests and overbearing churchmen, impelled him 
as he rushed like a maniac to the slaughter of the just. Sud- 
denly a light came down from heaven ; a gentle voice, the har- 
mony of infinite compassion, pierced his soul ; he groveled in 
the dust ; he knew that of all sinners he was the chief. 

Blind, he staggered on to Damascus. He was led by his 
companions, more helpless than a child. He saw no more the 
ever-blooming groves, the countless gardens, the radiant flow- 
ers that strewed the banks of the Golden Kiver, the rich ba- 
zaars, the crowded streets, the stately pomp of the paradise of 
cities. For three days he remained sightless. A miracle re- 
stored him; a presbyter of the Damascene Church received 
the penitent to its society; and he was forgiven by those 
whom he had sought to destroy. But not by himself. Paul 
fled from the luxurious landscape of Damascus to the wild and 



326 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

inhospitable desert. He hid in the sands of Arabia for three 
years. ( x ) Amidst the herbless solitude, overhung by rocks 
and mountains ever seared with torrid heat, the burning wind 
parching his fevered brow, his food the scanty gleanings of 
the desert, his dress that of the impoverished Bedouin, his only 
companions the wild beast and the serpent,( 2 ) the apostle per- 
haps lived in his remorse. Ever before him, in his wild re- 
treat, must have hovered the memory of his guilt ; of the gen- 
tle Stephen, whose dying love had failed to touch his own 
cruel heart ; of the weeping families he had tortured at Jeru- 
salem ; of the fierce hatred he had borne for the Church of 
Christ ; of the persecution he had instigated against his Lord. 
A man of deep conscientiousness, of the purest impulses, now 
that the veil of a cruel formalism had been torn away from 
his mind, we can well imagine with what abject penitence the 
once haughty persecutor prayed and fasted in the homeless 
desert. Yet, happier in his desolation than his pride, he toil- 
ed for forgiveness, purity, f aith.( 3 ) In the Arabian solitude, in 
the bitter struggle with remorseful woe, Paul was prepared for 
that fierce combat he was destined to wage with every dom- 
inant formalism, with the high-priest at Jerusalem or the im- 
perial Pontifex of Kome.( 4 ) 

Paul was born probably in the second or third year after 
the Saviour's birth. He may have been thirty-five years old 
at the time of his flight to Arabia. His youth was passed in 
his native city, Tarsus, in Cilicia, one of those brilliant centres 
of artistic taste and literary excellence that covered the pros- 
perous East, and the young Jew was, no doubt, highly cultiva- 
ted in its libraries and its lecture-rooms ; his avid mind gath- 

(*) The model of later anchorites. Hieron., Ep. 18, 43 : " Anachoretse qui 
soli habitant per deserta." 

( 2 ) Hieron., Ep. 18, 30: "Scorpiomnn tantum socius et ferarum." Je- 
rome is describing the Syrian deserts. 

( 3 ) See Galatians i., 17. 

( 4 ) Kenan's painful picture of the great apostle is altogether unhistoric- 
al; it is not the character painted by his contemporaries. See Kenan, 
St. Paul. He imputes to him want of heart, bitterness, intentional deceit. 
See ch. six. 



PAUL THE PERSECUTOR. 327 

ered knowledge eagerly from every source/ He was small 
and plain in appearance ; his health always infirm ; his voice 
sharp and tuneless ; his intellect ever active. From Tarsus he 
had come up to Jerusalem to study the sacred law under Ga- 
maliel, the most eminent of its professors, and at his house 
probably became acquainted with many young men of the 
priestly families who afterward sat with him on the bench- 
es of the Sanhedrim, or joined in his condemnation. Every 
young Jew was taught a trade, and was expected to provide 
for his own support ; Paul, during his studies, labored as a 
tent-maker, or perhaps a sail-maker, and from the coarse hair 
of the Cilician goat wove cloths for mariners and travelers. 
He was always industrious, and, having in his youth been 
preserved by labor from immoral tastes, enforced the duty of 
self-support upon his converts. He was a rigid formalist ; the 
high-priest was to him almost a mortal god ; the services of 
the Temple the only source of salvation ; the smoking offering, 
the daily prayers, the fasts and feasts of the Jewish law, the 
direct appointment of the Almighty. With horror, therefore, 
the rigid Pharisee beheld the daring innovations of the Chris- 
tians ; with inexpressible rage he listened to the arguments of 
Stephen. By nature he was' fierce and ardent ; he was a de- 
scendant of that savage Semitic race who had so often stoned 
the prophets — whose relatives, the Phoenician and the Cartha- 
ginian, forced mothers to throw their smiling babes into the 
blazing caldrons of Moloch, and who delighted in human sacri- 
fices. Paul's fierce fanaticism found a real joy in persecution. 
But in a moment the savage was converted into the tender, 
gentle saint. From the wild sands of Arabia, after his long 
and painful probation, Paul returned to Damascus a preach- 
er of the Gospel. He spoke with a natural fervor that won 
many hearts. Often scourged by Eoman and Jew, in prison 
or at the verge of death, he welcomed persecution with joy, 
and was ever eager to wear the crown of martyrdom. He 
escaped from Damascus, and about the year 43( 1 ) prepared to 
return to Jerusalem to seek the friendship and support of the 

(*) The exact date can net be fixed. 



328 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

Christian Church. Once more he approached the Holy City, 
and saw before him the magnificent Temple, the centre of his 
early adoration, glittering in the sunlight on Mount Moriah ; 
the hill of Zion covered with its palaces; the busy suburbs 
filled with the assemblies of the faithful. But for him all was 
changed. Shame and contrition probably weighed him down 
as he entered the scene of his former cruelties ; and he scarce- 
ly complained when the Christian Church at first shrunk from 
him in doubt and terror. How could they see in this man of 
cruelty and blood the great teacher of gentleness and mercy, 
whose inspired thoughts should pierce the hearts of the Gen- 
tiles, whose ceaseless toil was to found a Church that should 
live forever ? At last, in his humility and his contrition, Paul 
was made known to James and Peter, and lived in the house 
of the latter for fifteen days. Again he began to dispute in 
public, but a higher faith was now his only theme. All the 
vigor of his intellect, all the resources of his learning, were 
lavished in his controversies with the Jews of his native Ci- 
licia or of the Grecian lands. He was a new Stephen, teach- 
ing the religion of the heart. 

Driven from Jerusalem by the rage of his enemies, he be- 
gan that wonderful series of missionary labors that fulfilled in 
the highest degree the commands of the Master, that carried 
the name of Christ to the chief capitals of heathendom, and 
whose example has ever inspired the humble emulation of his 
modern imitators, who have penetrated with their glad tidings 
the savage shores of Greenland, the jungles of India, the isl- 
ands of the Pacific. He was the leader of the great' mental 
revolution whose centre was the Holy City.Q For twenty- 
five years the apostle wandered from land to land, maintained 
chiefly by his own labors, and inculcating by his example the 
dignity of honest toil. His intellect, ever active and vivid, 
was only strengthened by time ; his feeble frame, often borne 



C) St. Paul's freedom from Jewish prejudice is reflected in all the apos- 
tolic fathers. The Epistle of Barnabas is a protest against Judaism, c. iii., 
iv. So in the Epistle to Diognetus, c. i\\, the formal scrupulousness of the 
Jews is pronounced ridiculous. 



DEATH OF JAMES. 329 

down by disease, was sustained by a miraculous vigor; his 
joyous spirit, glad in its release from bondage, carried hope to 
the infant churches ; his inspired eloquence pierced with dead- 
ly wounds the sensual formalism of the age. 

An irreparable sorrow fell upon the apostolic company soon 
after St. Paul had left the city. For several years the Church 
had rested in peace. But now James the Elder, the first ap- 
ostolic martyr, died by the commands of a royal persecutor. 
Agrippa I., the grandson of Herod the Great, and the friend 
from childhood of the Emperor Caligula, was the last king 
that sat upon the throne of David. He had inherited the 
vices and the cruelty of his grandfather ; he was a worthy as- 
sociate of the infamous son of Germanicus ; yet his descent 
from the priestly race of the Asmoneans gave him an heredi- 
tary claim to the loyalty of the Jews, and he was eager to win 
their favor. In the last year of his life and reign he began a 
severe persecution of the Christians. To all the multitude that 
trod the prosperous streets of Jerusalem the forms and feat- 
ures of the apostolic band must have been familiar, and the 
fame of their holy lives had reached the corrupt circles of the 
palace on the hill of Zion. To gratify the Jews, Agrippa re- 
solved to destroy them all. He selected for his first victim 
the bold and active James, brother of John, and one of the 
best beloved of the disciples. James was beheaded. Tradi- 
tion relates that on his way to execution his chief accuser, 
stung by remorse, begged his forgiveness. The apostle kissed 
the repentant enemy, and said, " Peace be with thee." But 
the enraged Jews, unsoftened by the spectacle, put to death 
the accuser with the accused^ 1 ) Peter was arrested and 
thrown into prison, but was miraculously set free, and escaped 
from the city. A dreadful doom hung over all the apostles, 
when suddenly Agrippa died in horrible torments.( 2 ) The 
kingdom of David and Solomon perished with their corrupt 
successor, and from this time (44) until its destruction Jerusa- 
lem was governed by officials sent from Eome. 

C) Eusebius, H. E., ii., 9, from Clem. Alex. 
( 2 ) According to Gieseler, he died August 6th. 



330 THE CHUECR OF JERUSALEM. 

Paul soon after returned to the Holy City. A famine 
raged in Judaea ; the poor starved, and the Christian Church, 
impoverished by its liberality, must have suffered with the 
people. The Christians of Antioch and the other distant 
churches sent aid to their brethren in Jerusalem, and Paul 
was at the head of a delegation of the alms-bearers. He re- 
mained but a short time. The city was no safe place for the 
ardent missionary ; while far before him he saw that bound- 
less field of labor, the splendid cities of Asia Minor, of Syria, 
of Greece and Pome, toward which he was impelled by a 
heavenly call. He could not, like Peter and James, remain at 
rest in Jerusalem. He wept over the blindness of the heathen. 

At Antioch Paul made his first missionary station ; at An- 
tioch the disciples were first called Christians.^) In almost 
all the cities of the Poman world large colonies of Jews were 
established, and with their usual industry and thrift had made 
themselves powerful and wealthy. Cultivated and softened 
by Greek civilization, the Hellenized Jews fell easy converts 
to the inspired eloquence of the apostle. The Church at An- 
tioch, the oldest next to that of Jerusalem, flourished with 
singular vigor. From Antioch, attended by the chief presby- 
ters of the Church, Paul set out on his first missionary jour- 
ney ; he passed through Cyprus, Pisidia, Lystra ; he preached 
in the synagogues to great numbers of Jews and Gentiles ; in 
Lystra he healed a cripple, and the savage people, struck with 
wonder, believed that the gods were once more descended 
among them. Barnabas, tall and commanding in appearance, 
they supposed to be Jupiter. Paul, small, insignificant, but 
ever eloquent, was Mercury ; and the simple people, full of 
awe, summoned their priests, prepared oxen for sacrifice, and 
would have made prayers and libations to the divine strangers. 
Paul and Barnabas rent their clothes in anguish: "We are 
but men !" they cried out to the by-standers ;( 2 ) and Paul, in 
impassioned eloquence, preached to them the risen Lord. 

C) Baronius, as usual, would make Peter found the Church at Antioch 
(Ann. Ecc, i., 327) ; but when ? 

( 2 ) The conduct of Paul should check the spiritual pride of modern priests. 



TEE FIRST COUNCIL. 331 

Meantime in Jerusalem the wonderful success of the apos- 
tle had fixed the attention of the Church. They saw with as- 
tonishment the conversion of the Gentiles ; they still doubted 
if there could be salvation out of the Mosaic law. James and 
Peter were startled at the liberality of Paul ; they trembled 
lest he had departed from the faith ; they resolved to hold a 
general assembly of the Church, to decide, under the guidance 
of inspiration, the future rule of belief. Paul and his fellow- 
missionaries had determined that circumcision and an observ- 
ance of the Jewish rites should not be enforced upon his Gen- 
tile converts. James and the other apostles thought their doc- 
trine heretical ; " false brethren," as St. Paul relates, had stim- 
ulated and imbittered the controversy. To restore the rule of 
Christian harmony, the infant Church assembled in the year 
50 at Jerusalem. 

The first council forms an instructive contrast to the long 
line of its mediseval and corrupt successors. An apostolic 
grace hung over all its proceedings.^) There was no claim of 
infallibility on the part of Peter and his associates ; no threat 
of violence and persecution ; no trace of priestly ambition or 
of spiritual pride. James the Just presided as the represent- 
ative of the family of Christ. Around him were gathered 
John, ever gentle; Peter, full of love and hope; Andrew, 
the first-born of the apostles. One vacant place must have 
touched the hearts of all the sacred company. They looked 
in vain for the well-beloved form of the martyr James. The 
council met in some plain house in the city, and the whole 
Church, of all degrees, took part in its proceedings. The 
apostle claimed no greater authority than the simplest lay- 
man, and every question was decided by a common suffrage. ( 2 ) 
Each Christian was the member of a holy priesthood, and was 
subject only to the Ruler of the skies. From the Council of 
Jerusalem to the Council of Constance, of Trent, or of Pome, 



C) Pressense, Hist. Trois. Siec, lias given a clear account of the apostolic 
age, i., p. 459 et seq. See Schaffer, Hist. Ap. Church, p. 254, for the council. 

( 2 ) For the purity and simplicity of the apostolic faith and usages con- 
sult the Apostolic Fathers. Migne's edition may be used with discretion. 



332 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

the eye turns with singular interest. In the last — the council 
of our own day — beneath the pomp of St. Peter's, the glare 
of dull-eyed images, the glitter of gaudy idols, the peal of pa- 
gan sounds and rites, a throng of bishops and an infallible 
Pope meet to legislate for Christianity. But should some fol- 
lower of St. Paul presume to assert the rights of conscience 
and of private judgment before the modern sanhedrim, like 
the apostle, he would, perhaps, be smitten on the face by some 
despotic priest ; with apostolic indignation he might exclaim, 
" Thou whited sepulchre !" In the modern council freedom 
of debate is forbidden, and religious despotism enforced by 
the papal rifles. At Trent a still sterner tyranny prevailed. 
Luther and Calvin, the spiritual descendants of St. Paul, 
shrunk in aversion and terror from the unscrupulous assem- 
bly. At Constance the contrast deepens into tragic interest 
when, amidst mail-clad princes and mitred priests, its holy 
martyrs, the defenders of mental freedom, are burned to ashes 
beside the rapid Ehine. 

But no temporal chief or spiritual despot controlled the as- 
sembly of the saints at Jerusalem ; no gay-robed procession 
of imperious bishops swept into the modest chamber. Paul, 
covered with the dust of travel, clad in the coarse garb of per- 
petual poverty, came up to speak words of inspired wisdom to 
his brethren. The gentle Christians, no doubt, listened with 
eager joy to his earnest eloquence. The narrow room over- 
flowed with the number of the faithful. The strict rule of 
the Mosaic law was swept away by a unanimous decision, and 
Paul set out once more on his mission to the heathen, the 
teacher of harmony, union, and a common faith.Q 

Ever with the great labors of the apostle is associated the 
venerable name of Ephesus, the chief of the apocalyptic 
Churches. The traveler who approaches the site of the fa- 
mous city,( 2 ) on the shore of Asia Minor, sees only a wide mo- 
rass, a few huts and hovels, and various huge mounds of buried 



C) Schaff., Hist. Ap. Church, p. 255. Some restrictions were retained, 
but soon forgotten. 

( 2 ) Arundell, Seven Churches, p. 4-24. 



EPHESUS. 333 

ruins rising beyond. Yet the name of Paul still keeps alive 
the memory of the lost metropolis, once more splendid than 
any Europe boasts. One mound is called his prison ; anoth- 
er the theatre where the clamorous Ephesians demanded his 
death ; another the Temple of Diana. Of all the ancient 
shrines the most gorgeous and the most renowned was that 
of the virgin goddess, the bright, prolific moon of the tropic 
East.Q All Asia had united in lavishing its wealth on the 
marvelous Temple ; the ladies of Ephesus had given their jew- 
els to restore its splendors, and each of its columns of precious 
stone or marble was the gift of a king. Amidst its flowery 
groves, fed by perpetual springs, the fair fabric arose, the 
largest and most costly work of the ancient architects. Its col- 
onnade was more than four hundred feet long and two hundred 
wide, and each Ionic column was sixty feet high. Statues by 
Praxiteles, pictures by Apelles, and countless works of art em- 
bellished its labyrinth of halls. In the interior a rude wooden 
statue of Diana, venerable in its simplicity, and which was be- 
lieved to have fallen from the skies, was hidden amidst a blaze 
of precious stones. A train of effeminate priests and virgin 
priestesses lived within the sacred precincts, swept in gorgeous 
processions through the noble porticoes, and celebrated the 
worship of the guardian deity of Ephesus. The high-priest of 
Diana was the chief person in the city; and little images of 
the deity, of silver or gold, were manufactured by the jewelers 
of Ephesus, and sold in great numbers to her devout worship- 
ers throughout the East. In the month of May, when spring 
had sown the fertile land with flowers, all Asia gathered with- 
in the sacred city, and celebrated with games and sports the 
annual festival of the goddess. 

On one of these occasions Paul preached in Ephesus. Al- 
ready his name was renowned in the East ; he was looked upon 
with alarm, and hatred by priest and worshiper. A wild tu- 



(*) The Epliesian Artemis can scarcely be disconnected from moon wor- 
ship. Yet see Welcker, Griech. Gotterlehre, i., p. 562. She was the symbol 
of productiveness. Eckermann, Eel. G., ii., 67. " Der Cult der Ephesischen 
Artemis endlich ist ungriechischer." 



334 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

mult arose, and the artisans of Ephesus called out for his death. 
He was accused of having preached against graven images, 
of having insulted the majesty of Diana. The people rushed 
in a great crowd to their magnificent theatre, now one of the 
mounds that disfigure the silent shore, and shouted with in- 
cessant zeal, " Great is Diana of Ephesus !" Paul's fate seemed 
certain ; he hid in a private house ; the tumult was quieted by 
a prudent magistrate ; the apostle escaped. But his voice had 
pierced the splendid ritual of Diana with mortal wounds. A 
prosperous church arose at Ephesus ; the pagan worship passed 
slowly away ; the graven images he had condemned were laid 
aside for a purer faith ; the famous Temple sunk into ruins, 
and in later ages its jasper columns were ravished away to 
adorn the Christian churches built by Constantine. In the 
devout city of Ephesus St. John is said to have passed his old 
agejQ and a graceful tradition relates that when grown too 
infirm to preach, he would be carried to the assembly of the 
faithful, and repeat the words, " Little children, love one an- 
other." 

Swiftly the great apostle passed from city to city, filling the 
world with the tumult of a radical reform.( 2 ) The labors of 
Luther, of Wesley, of Whitefield but faintly represent the in- 
cessant achievements of the last ten years of his life. At Co- 
lossse, at Philippi or Corinth, he founded churches in the centre 
of rigid paganism, and planted the conception of ideal virtue 
in the corrupt soil of classic civilization. But it was at Athens 
that the eloquence of St. Paul must have gathered around 
him the most gifted of his audiences. The city had changed 
but little in appearance since Socrates had taught in its public 
square, or Demosthenes roused the dying patriotism of its peo- 
ple — since Atticus had made it his mental home, or Cicero 
studied in its schools. Still, on the Acropolis, the lovely tem- 
ple of Pallas rose in the clear sunlight almost as perfect as in 
the moment of its completion. The gardens and groves of 



( J ) Eusebius, iii., 31. The history of Eusebius is a store-house of legends. 
( 2 ) Eusebius, iii., 3. Luke composed the Acts from what he saw him- 
self. 



ATHENS. 335 

Plato and Aristotle were yet trodden by their disciples. The 
statues of the greatest of sculptors, the pictures of the most 
tasteful of painters, the most delicate conceptions of the ar- 
chitect, and the fair landscape of its unsullied sea, made Athens 
still the centre of the beautiful ; and its schools of thought 
yet lingered fondly over the ballads of Homer, the wild crea- 
tions of iEschylus, and the gentle philosophy of Plato. St. 
Paul had no doubt studied Greek literature in his native Tar- 
sus, and could scarcely have entered its ancient seat without a 
thrill of admiration. 

The people of Athens were still chiefly philosophers or stu- 
dents. For two centuries it had been an academic city, the 
university of the world. They gathered eagerly around the 
wonderful Jew. His fame had no doubt reached the Agora, 
and the Athenians must have known that from him they need 
look for no dull declamation, no trite philosophy. They re- 
ceived him with respect, as he spoke, like Socrates, iu the pub- 
lic streets ; they listened with interest, and invited him to ad- 
dress them from the Hill of Mars. On some fair day of the 
Attic autumn, when the grasshoppers chirped languidly be- 
neath the gray and dusty olive, and when the herbage was em- 
browned in the gardens of Academe, the people of Athens 
gathered in the open air, around the stone pulpit of the ven- 
erable hill. There for ages had sat the Areopagus — the su- 
preme tribunal of the State. There the most eminent citizens 
of Athens had formed the most respectable of human courts ; 
there a long succession of important causes had awaited the 
decisions of dignified judges ; and there the philosophers and 
students of Athens assembled to hear, for the first time, the 
higher eloquence of inspiration. Small, plain, wasted with 
toil and sickness, with sufferings and endless persecution, his 
voice feeble, his enunciation marred by the Semitic accent, 
Paul yet enchained the attention of his hearers. His Jewish 
face and figure could scarcely have pleased the lovers of the 
beautiful; his shrill intonation must have shocked their crit- 
ical ears. But the acute Athenians may have seen in his plain 
aspect something fairer than any exterior grace. From his 
eyes beamed the perfection of moral purity; in his counte- 



336 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

nance shone that perfect honesty and manly self-control which 
Plato had faintly described. He spoke of the unknown God, 
now for the first time revealed, of the common brotherhood 
of man, of the resurrection and a Messiah. We have but a 
slight abstract of his speech, yet we can readily imagine that 
a solemn awe rested on the vast assembly as the temple-clad 
hills above and the city below echoed for the first time with 
the name of the Omnipresent, and philosophers and students, 
stoics and epicureans, heard with astonishment a wisdom above 
that of Plato and Aristotle. 

The Church of Athens sprung up at the touch of Paul. It 
was formed, no doubt, on the plan of that of Jerusalem. It 
had its presbyters and deacons, its modest rites, its simple 
faith. Its chief elder was afterward called a bishop, and tradi- 
tion relates that Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, who 
had been converted by the sermon on Mars Hill, was its first 
president. Q We have scarcely space to follow the wonderful 
career of St. Paul. At length old age approached him, and 
he anticipated without alarm a martyr's doom. He had al- 
ways longed to preach at Rome and in the farthest West : he 
was not to be disappointed. Once more he sailed along the 
coasts of Asia Minor, visiting the churches. At Miletus he 
delivered his farewell sermon to the assembled faithful; he 
left them kneeling and praying on the shore. He had told 
them they were to see his face no more. He reached Jerusa- 
lem about the year 58, and was received with friendly greet- 
ing by James the Just and the other elders ; he told, with his 
usual vigor, the story of his missionary labors. 

But Jerusalem was now fast preparing its own destruction. 
An insane hatred against the Romans, a hopeless longing for 
freedom, a wild rage against the tolerant Christians, filled the 
vast multitude that came up to the Temple to pray.( 2 ) Had 
the Jews yielded to the mild persuasion of James the Just or 
the liberal spirit of St. Paul, Jerusalem might have escaped its 
awful fate, and have survived through centuries as the head 

O Eusebius, H. E., iv., 23. 

( 2 ) Conybeare and Howsou, St. Paul, ii., p. 244. 



PAUL AT JERUSALEM. 337 

of the Christian Church. Its people, however, were mad with 
religious frenzy. The zealots controlled the nation ; the Ro- 
mans felt that they were hated, and retaliated by a cruel op- 
pression ; and the Christians at least foresaw that the dreadful 
day foretold by the Master was near. In this period of wild 
fanaticism among his countrymen, Paul, too conspicuous to be 
neglected, in vain endeavored, by the advice of James, to dis- 
arm their rage by conforming to the full requirements of the 
law. It was too late. His name was abhorred by every fa- 
natic, by almost every Jew. In the Pentecostal festival, when 
the Temple was filled with strangers from Ephesus and Asia, 
he ventured within the sacred courts. He was set upon by a 
ferocious mob. Feeble with age and suffering, he was beat- 
en and tossed about, and the people dragged him beyond the 
Temple walls to put him to death. 

North of the Temple, and joined to it by a bridge or stairs, 
stood the Castle of Antonia, now filled with a Roman garrison. 
From its turrets the sentinels kept watch over the excited 
worshipers below them in the sacred courts, and carefully ob- 
served their conduct. The Romans saw Paul struggling in 
the throng, and a band of soldiers sprung down the stairway 
into the Temple court to save him from their rage. They 
dragged him up the stairs ; he was safe. Yet, in the fierce 
excitement of this perilous moment, the apostle still hoped to 
soften and preserve his countrymen. He said to the Roman 
commander, "May I speak?" He obtained permission, and 
then turned to the Jews below. He waved his hand, and sud- 
denly the angry people grew still. The spectacle of that last 
appeal to Jerusalem still stirs the fancy more than the high- 
est efforts of Cicero or Gracchus. Paul stood on an elevation 
looking down into the Temple court.Q Above him glittered 
the Holy House so soon to pass away. Before him shone the 
hill of Zion ; below, the proud and prosperous city ; silent at 
his feet hung the multitude from whose rage he had just 
escaped, bruised, beaten, and forlorn, whose coming doom he 
foresaw, whom he strove in vain to save. His clear voice 

C) Couybeare and Howson, ii., p. 255. 

22 



338 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

rang out in his own melodious tongue through the Temple 
and the castle, as he recounted his conversion, his penitence, 
and hope. The Jews listened ; perhaps some believed. But 
when he spoke of the mission to the Gentiles, of toleration for 
their oppressors, the hate of the fanatical nation broke forth 
in a terrible clamor. They cried out that he was a wretch 
unfit to live — that he polluted the earth ; in their rage, they 
tore their garments and threw dust upon their heads. The 
Poman commander, Lysias, was now convinced that Paul had 
committed some dreadful crime, and ordered him to be carried 
to the castle and put to torture. He was hurried to a dun- 
geon; the instruments of torture were brought, when the 
apostle declared himself a Poman citizen. He was saved. Q 

After the day of horrors he probably slept in the castle. 
He lay surrounded by the coarse soldiers, yet less cruel than 
his countrymen. The next day Lysias sent him under a 
guard before the Sanhedrim ; and in the hall of Gazith, with- 
in the Temple, where he had himself sat twenty-five years be- 
fore to condemn Stephen, Paul ventured to defend his own 
career of penitence.Q Page filled the hearts of the insane 
council ; the high-priest, Ananias, ordered him to be smitten 
in the face. Yet the apostle spoke with vigor, and even won 
the favor of a part of his judges. The council-room was filled 
with an angry multitude, and the Poman commander sent a 
guard to bring Paul back to the castle. In the night Paul's 
nephew, his sister's son, heard that a band of forty Jews had 
sworn to assassinate his uncle. They belonged probably to the 
party of the zealots, and had gained the assent of the Sanhe- 
drim, the highest court in the city, to their horrible design. 
Paul told the Romans of his danger. In the night he was 
sent secretly out of the city, under a strong guard, to Csesarea. 
Swiftly the well -trained soldiers, with their weary charge, 
swept over the road to the distant town, rousing the sleeping 
peasant by their steady march, and followed by the curses of 
the subject Jew. They passed the hills of Ephraim, the fields 

( x ) Conybeare and Howson, ii., p. 259. 

( 2 ) He addressed them as equals — "Men and brothers." 



CMSABEA. 339 

of Sharon glowing with a bountiful harvest, the mountains of 
Samaria. The foot - soldiers went only part of the way ; the 
cavalry pressed on, and in the bright afternoon of the Jewish 
summer rode into Caesarea.Q 

It was the sea-port of Judaea, the seat of the Roman gov- 
ernor, a city adorned by Herod the Great with all the refine- 
ments of Roman taste. Its port was a basin of stone -work 
of singular beauty. Its temples and theatres, its palaces and 
gardens, were modeled upon those of Rome. Its name was 
a compliment to the Caesars. Up to its low shores rolled the 
blue Mediterranean, bearing the wares and the ships of Italy 
to the land of David ; yet, later, to bring them filled with 
arms. To-day the wild bushes grow over the site of the pal- 
aces where Herod, the two Agrippas, Felix, and Festus held 
their revelry ;( 2 ) where the frail Berenice won or enchained 
the heart of Titus ;( 3 ) over the fragments of temples and the 
sunken stone-work of the ancient walls. Yet Caesarea is hal- 
lowed by the foot-prints of St. Paul. Above its lonely waste 
one sacred figure still seems to hover perpetually ; from its 
solemn ruin one voice is forever heard. Here for two years 
Paul was held a prisoner. Here, soon after his arrival, he was 
brought before Felix to be judged. The most infamous of 
men, according to Tacitus, cruel, vicious, treacherous, ( 4 ) sat in 
judgment upon him who was to be the herald of purity to 
mankind. Paul's accusers, the Jewish priests, full of that 
bitter hate toward him which seems to have risen to insani- 
ty, hastened from Jerusalem to Caesarea to give testimony to 
his guilt. There, in the judgment-hall, stood the fierce high- 
priest, Ananias, the chief members of the Sanhedrim, and a 
hired advocate employed to convict Paul of treason against 
Rome. Amidst his fierce accusers, before the terrible judge, 

(*) It was the Pentecostal season, in July. Caesarea was about sixty 
miles from Jernsalem. 

( 2 ) Pococke, Travels in the East. 

( 3 ) They met first at Caesarea Philippi; yet Titus must Often have been 
detained at the sea-port. 

( 4 ) Tacitus, Hist., v., 9. Suetonius, Claud., 28, calls him " Trium regina- 
rum maritus." 



34:0 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

the wayworn, aged apostle spoke with his usual fire ; the judge 
hesitated ; the decision was postponed ; the high-priest and his 
followers went back, disappointed, to Jerusalem. Again, at 
Csesarea, Paul was brought before Felix and his wife, Drusilla ; 
and now, at the sound of his rapt voice, Felix trembled. Two 
years passed away. Often, followed by his guard, the apostle 
probably wandered along the sandy beach of Csesarea, and 
gazed with a martyr's hope upon the sea that was to be his 
pathway to Eome and death. At length Felix was removed 
from office. Festus was now governor, and, with strange per- 
sistence, the fanatic Jews urged him to destroy Paul. They 
hoped to assassinate him within the Holy City; but Festus 
refused to allow the prisoner to be taken back to Jerusalem. 
He summoned Paul before him, and again at Csesarea the tri- 
al was renewed ; again the implacable priests came to prove 
Paul worthy of death ; again they were disappointed. " I ap- 
peal," cried the apostle, " to Caesar." He must now be sent to 
Pome to be tried by Nero in person. Yet before he went, at 
Csesarea, in the audience-chamber of some magnificent palace, 
whose ruin now lies undistinguished on that desolate plain, 
King Agrippa II., then a young man of twenty-six, his sister 
Berenice, beautiful as frail, and the generous Festus, called be- 
fore them the famous missionary, and listened patiently to his 
wonderful theme. He was chained to a soldier. He could 
stretch out only one of his hands. Yet the youthful king, the 
fair, unhappy princess, the friendly governor, heard perhaps 
with solemn awe, perhaps with pretended levity, the divine 
message. Once Festus interrupted him. Once Agrippa said, 
" Thou wilt soon persuade me to be a Christian." Then they 
separated and passed away. The dissolute king, the voluptu- 
ous woman, to despair and death ; the eloquent old man to the 
priceless joys of martyrdom. Thus CsGsarea and its princely 
state revive with the memory of Paul. 

Next the apostle is seen on the deck of a huge Alexandrian 
corn vessel, guarded by Poman soldiers, passing slowly along 
the southern coast of Crete on the way to Eome.( 2 ) That the 

( 2 ) Conybeare and Howson describe at large the famous voyage, ch. xxiii. 



PAUL IN THE STOEM. 341 

ship was very large is shown from the circumstance that two 
hundred and sixty-seven persons, besides a heavy cargo, found 
shelter within it.Q Like all ancient vessels, it was badly con- 
structed, and in moments of danger was strengthened by ropes 
passed around the keel. It had two rudders ; its course was 
very slow. The wind at first was uncertain ; the ship reached 
the port of the Fair Havens safely, and here Paul advised the 
captain to stay ; but the wind was now favorable, and the sail- 
or drifted on before it. Then suddenly broke upon the un- 
manageable ship a fierce storm from the mountains, driving 
her toward the African shore. It was one of the hurricanes 
of the Mediterranean. The waves rose high ; the sky was 
covered with a perpetual night ; torrents of rain fell inces- 
santly ; the wind drove the struggling vessel from its course. 
For fourteen days the Euroclydon held the great corn ship in 
its grasp. She sprung a leak ; was rapidly filling with water ; 
despair ruled on board ; and Romans and Egyptians, officers 
and crew, assembled on the deck, looking for instant death. 
But Paul alone, with cheerful countenance, watched the angry 
skies, the raging seas, and said to his fellow-passengers, "Be 
of good cheer ; you are safe." Next, in the lull of the tem- 
pest, was heard the roar of distant breakers — the ominous 
sound of land. Paul in the moment of peril almost held com- 
mand of the ship ; he pressed the terrified passengers and crew 
to take food to sustain their strength ; he ordered the boat 
to be cut adrift ; the cargo was thrown overboard ; the ship 
struck with a violent shock on an unknown coast, and broke 
to pieces. It was a lonely part of the island of Malta. Float- 
ing on portions of the wreck, or swimming through the surf, 
the whole ship's crew escaped, as Paul had foretold. Roman 
and Egyptian, bond and free, perhaps, gathered around the 
apostle as he knelt on the desolate coast and gave thanks to 
Heaven. 

Of the later career of St. Paul we have little room to speak.( 2 ) 
He became the connecting link between the Church of Jeru- 

( 1 ) Penrose estimated the ship's burden at five hundred tons. 

( 2 ) Conybeare and Howson may be consulted, chh. xxv., xxvii. 



342 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

salem and the early Church of Rome. He impressed upon 
his first converts his own honesty and simplicity. The Church 
of Rome owed at least its chief vigor to the preaching of the 
saint. His disciples, Linus and Clement, became its first pres- 
byters, or bishops ; and the epistle of the latter to the Corin- 
thians is full of the liberality and humility of Paul.Q From 
Jerusalem to Rome Paul bore only the simplicity of the faith. 
Yet history throws but a feeble light on the last days of the 
apostle. At Rome he lived a prisoner in his own hired house ; 
he preached and wrote incessantly, in his own handwriting, his 
letters and exhortations. He was probably tried again. He 
stood before Nero, the Pontif ex Maximus of the ancient faith, 
in the imperial court ; again one of the most wicked of man- 
kind sat in judgment upon the most innocent ; again St. Paul 
must have spoken — must have been set free. From this time 
nothing is known of his career ; yet tradition relates that he 
preached in the fair cities of Spain, was perhaps permitted to 
revisit his infant churches in Greece, and then returned again 
to become a martyr at Rome. Far out on the Ostian Way, 
in a desolate country, once clothed with groves and gardens, 
a magnificent church, crusted with marble and costly stones, 
rich in painting and mosaic — a miracle of useless wastefulness 
and splendor — arises on the spot where tradition indicates that 
the Roman lictors beheaded St. Paul.( 2 ) His boundless suffer- 
ings and toils, his manly energy, his ceaseless hope, his joyous 
trustfulness, and his supernatural powers, have made him the 
most eminent of the apostles. 

With the labors of St. Paul at Rome is connected the most 
important or the most insignificant of historical questions :( 3 ) 
Was St. Peter his coadjutor? was Peter ever at Rome? To 
the Protestant the question is of little consequence ; to the de- 
fenders of an infallible papacy it is the most momentous of 

C) Eusebius, H. E., iii., 4. 

( 2 ) Merivale, H. R., v., p. 276 et seq., and Gibbon, c. xvi., doubt the martyr- 
dom of Paul and the persecution of the Christians under Nero. 

( 3 ) The literature of this question is, of course, immense, from Spauheim 
to Gieseler. Schaff and some Protestants admit the tradition (see Schaff, 
p. 362), but only in part. See Neauder, Kiroh. Gesch., i., p. 317, and note. 



WAS ST PETER AT ROME f 343 

all. If St. Peter was never at Home, or went thither only to 
be martyred, the whole fabric of the papacy must fall with- 
out a blow. For how could Peter transfer from Jerusalem to 
Pome an infallible primacy % How could he have reigned as 
the vicar of Christ, the lord of kings, the vicegerent of Heaven, 
in a city which he never visited, and whose infant Church was 
fostered or founded by Paul and his disciples.Q 

Historically it is impossible that St. Peter could ever have 
entered the Imperial City. St. Luke, his contemporary, who 
wrote the Acts of the Apostles, would certainly never have 
neglected to mention the most important of them all ; but St. 
Luke confines Peter's missionary labors to the distant East. 
St. Paul in his letters carefully enumerates the chief members 
of the Church at Pome ; the name of St. Peter never occurs in 
the apostolic record. ( 2 ) During his imprisonment no one but 
Luke, he said, was with him. We have St. Peter's own epistle. 
It is dated at Babylon, and is addressed to the distant churches 
of the East, where he had long been laboring. "Whenever he 
appears in the sacred writings, St. Peter is always at Jerusa- 
lem or preaching in its neighborhood ;( 3 ) when he writes him- 
self he is founding churches in Asia, and wholly forgets to 
assert that he is the infallible representative of the Deity on 
earth, reigning at Pome. He calls himself, indeed, only an 
elder among elders. 

Tradition, therefore, is the only foundation of the legend. 
To have famous martyrs was the chief pride of the early 
churches, and it is possible that some ardent presbyter of 
Rome, as fanciful as Prudentius, first conducted St. Peter to 
his martyrdom on the Vatican. The story grew with the lapse 
of time. His tomb was discovered ; he was crucified with his 
head downward ; his frequent timidity was recalled in the 
legend of his flight and of the apparition of his Lord; and 
when the Papal Church of the Middle Ages began its usurpa- 

(*) Even Neander finally doubted the tradition (Apost. Gesch.) : in his 
Church Hist, he accepted it. 

( 2 ) See the list in Epist. to Romans. 

( 3 ) The Romish writers make Peter travel as widely as St. Paul (Baro- 
nius, i., 455) ; but of this, Luke knew nothing. 



344 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

tion, it boldly claimed, enlarging upon St. Jerome, that Peter 
had reigned for twenty -five years as the vicar of Christ at 
Rome.Q The legend was first pronounced a fable by the 
acute Waldenses, who had for ages scoffed at the papal pre- 
tensions, and who claim to represent the opinions of the early 
Church that preceded and resisted the haughty hierarchy of 
Constantine. The traditions of the Vaudois, the Church of 
the people, may at least counterbalance those of the Romish 
priesthood, and confirm the accuracy of the Scriptural his- 
tory-0 

But we must hasten to the last period (66-70) of the suffer- 
ings of Jerusalem and its Church. A deeper mental darkness, 
a wilder fanaticism, rested upon the sacred city. The broth- 
erhood of the zealots, linked together by their terrible oath, 
grew in numbers and ruled the policy of the nation. The 
wild robbers issued from their mountain caves to spread des- 
olation over Galilee and Judaea ; assassins filled the city ; the 
multitudes who came up to the Temple were roused to frenzy 
by the secret promptings of the robber patriots ; the children 
of Israel — poetic, impassioned, Semitic, easily moved to a vain 
self-confidence, easily driven to a mad despair — fancied that 
by a violent struggle they might shake off the yoke of Rome.( 3 ) 
The higher orders of the city, the more intelligent, knew that 
the plan was hopeless ; but the half -savage zealots from the 
rural districts now governed Jerusalem. In this moment of 
patriotic excitement the Christians, who would take no share 
in the rebellion, were probably looked upon as traitors as well 
as heretics. The chief victim of this intense hatred was James 
the Just, the brother of the Lord. For thirty years the face 
and form of the son of Mary had been known to all Jerusa- 

(*) Baronius, with excessive minuteness, names the year 45 Petri Annus 
1, Ann. Ecc, L, 409. He knows even the day on which the Soman Church 
was born. Neander doubts even the martyrdom, Plant. Chris., i., p. 358. 

( 2 ) See Waldensian Eesearches, Gilly, vol. i., p. 42, and Leger. The Wal- 
denses boast a direct descent from the apostles. The Nobla Leycon, a poem 
of the year 1100, notices their origin ; but often they have been nearly ex- 
tirpated by the papal persecutions. 

( 3 ) Rabelleau, Histoire des He'breux, ii., p. 285. A useful narrative. 



MARTYRDOM OF JAMES THE JUST, 345 

lem ; he had grown old as the head of the Christian sect ; his 
virtues were admired by Jew as well as Christian ; and he had 
striven, by gentle compliances, to disarm the malice of his fel- 
low-citizens. He had never, like Paul, denounced the Mosaic 
law ; or, like a greater than Paul, preached a new dispensation. 
In form and appearance James is said to have so closely re- 
sembled his divine brother as scarcely to be distinguished 
from him.Q He was now to share a not dissimilar fate. 
When Paul had escaped by appealing to Csesar, the enraged 
Jews, says Eusebius, turned their fury against James.( 2 ) In 
some wild season of fanaticism, when the city teemed with 
savage worshipers, the priests and people seized James, per- 
haps as he climbed the sacred terraces to pray, and bore him 
to a high tower of the Temple, overlooking the Gentile court 
below. The Sadducees were the bitterest enemies of the 
Christians. It was the young Sadducee high-priest Ananus 
that led the new persecution. We may imagine the venerable 
saint standing on the giddy height, waiting to be thrown down 
on the pavement far beneath. ( 3 ) They commanded him to re- 
nounce his faith in Christ. He replied by pointing to the 
risen Lord above. With rage they cast him down. When he 
had fallen, the multitude stoned him nearly to death. " See," 
said a by-stander, " Justus is praying for you." A fuller beat 
out the brains of the dying saint with his club. His tomb- 
stone was afterward shown outside the Temple. So eminent 
were the virtues and the fame of the brother of Christ that 
Josephus attributes the destruction of Jerusalem to the an- 
ger of Heaven at the insane cruelty of his countrymen. ( 4 ) The 
family of the Saviour, however, still ruled over the Church at 
Jerusalem ; they possessed a kind of hereditary claim to its 
leadership ; and after the fall of the city, Simeon, the brother 
or the cousin of James, filled his place for many years with 
equal virtues, and died a martyr in extreme old age.Q 



( 1 ) Epistle of Ignatius. 

( 2 ) Eusebius, H. E., ii., 23. The accounts of his death vary. 

( 3 ) Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius, gives the story, ii., 23. 

(*) Josephus. Eusebius, ii., 23. ( 5 ) Eusebius, iii., 11. 



346 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

Around the city of Mount Zion, according to the Talmuds 
and Josephus, began now to gather the omens of its doom. 
In the western sky, as the sun was setting, the crimson clouds 
formed themselves in the image of a battle-field. Armies 
rushed over the fading heavens, engaged in a dreadful con- 
test ; chariots filled with armed men contended on the celestial 
plain ; cities were surrounded and sacked ; the fate of Jerusa- 
lem was painted on the skies.Q Within its walls the prodi- 
gies were equally alarming. A supernatural fire shone over 
the Temple in the midst of the night ; the great eastern gate, 
which could scarcely be shut by twenty men, bolted and fast- 
ened by immense bars of iron, rolled open of its own accord ; 
and when the priests were ministering in the inner sanctuary 
they heard the noise of a multitude of voices crying, " Let us 
remove hence." A blazing comet, shaped like a sword, hung 
over the city. A madman or a prophet ran through the streets, 
crying, "Woe, woe to the city, to the people, to the Holy 
House !" No punishment, no kindness, no prayers could si- 
lence his mournful wail. For seven years he kept up his 
ceaseless cry, until, during the siege, a stone from an engine 
struck him dead.( 2 ) The Christians, too, remembering the 
prophecy of the Lord, knew that the evil days were approach- 
ing, and prepared to fly from the coming woe. 

In the last years of Nero's reign the war broke out. The 
madness of the Jews, the cruelty of the Romans, arrayed the 
two hostile races against each other. The Jews were at first 
successful in driving off a Roman army ; and Nero, who was 
singing and acting before the applauding audiences of Rome, 
sent his best commander, Vespasian, to repress the insurrec- 
tion. Jerusalem, meantime, had become an armed fortress, 
the centre of rebellion. Its priestly rulers made preparations 
for an inexpiable war. The city was filled with provisions, 
arms, and men ; the walls were strengthened, the towers gar- 



(') Josephus, B. J., vi., 5. 

( 2 ) The Talmuds repeat the prodigies, and show the overwrought condi- 
tion of the Jewish mind. Nothing was natural — nothing simple. Deren- 
bourg, i., p. 280 ei seq. 



GALILEE RAVAGED. 347 

risoned ; all Palestine had risen in revolt ; and skillful leaders 
were set over the different provinces to array the populace in 
military order. It was hoped, it was believed, that every Jew 
would join the army, and that the Romans would be over- 
whelmed by an immense host, irresistible in fanatical zeal. 

Galilee, the most northern province, filled with populous 
cities and a warlike people, must first meet the shock of in- 
vasion^ 1 ) It was placed under the command of the historian 
Josephus. A cloud of doubt will ever rest upon the character 
of this eminent writer. In his own age he was looked upon 
as a traitor, the destroyer of his country, and his most favora- 
ble commentators have admitted his feebleness and his inef- 
ficiency ;( 2 ) yet in his own writings Josephus has painted him- 
self in such favorable colors as to have won the regard of gen- 
erations of readers. He was rich, high-born, connected with 
the noble and priestly families of Jerusalem, and his learning 
and mental culture have given him a respectable place among 
the inferior historians; but as a commander he was singu- 
larly unfortunate. He entered Galilee commissioned to raise 
an army of one hundred thousand men; he obtained only 
eight thousand. He aroused no enthusiasm among the war- 
like people ; his movements were slow and ineffectual. Ves- 
pasian invaded the flourishing province, and, with terrible rav- 
ages, sacked its happy cities and filled its sacred landscape 
with scenes of woe. The Lake of Genesareth was dyed with 
blood. Its charming environs, the paradise of Palestine, re- 
sounded with lamentation.Q The Roman cavalry swept over 
the country, killing the helpless people. Josephus was be- 
sieged at Jotopata, was beaten, ( 4 ) was captured, made his 
peace with the Romans, and lived and died the companion 
and the friend of his country's destroyers. 

Yespasian moved slowly onward, destroying the country 
as he passed.Q He left behind him a bleeding, half -desolate 

0) Josephus, B. J., iii., 3. ( 2 ) Id., iii., 10. 

( 3 ) Rapball, Post-Bib. Hist., ii., p. 417. 

( 4 ) " Josepbe," says Derenbourg, i., p. 417, " merite peu de confiance pour 
ce qu'il raconte de cette lutte supreme de ses coreligiouuaires," etc. 

( 5 ) Rapball, ii., p. 428. 



348 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

waste. He swept through Samaria, and the Samaritan wom- 
en wept over their husbands and their brothers slain on the 
hill of Gerizim. Joppa and Tiberias fell. He passed around 
Jerusalem, and ravaged all Judsea. Emmaus and Jericho, 
Lydda and Jamna, surrendered. He killed ten thousand men 
in the heart of Idumsea. The Dead Sea echoed to the note of 
the Roman trumpets ; all Palestine had felt the dreadful dis- 
cipline of the Roman chief. Two years of warfare passed ; 
Jerusalem stood alone in the midst of its ruined country. At 
this moment Nero was dead ; Vitellius ruled at Rome ; a war 
of succession followed ; Rome was filled with massacres ; and 
at last Vespasian was proclaimed emperor. The impoverished 
soldier, the horse-dealer, the plebeian, was alone fitted to con- 
trol that mighty empire that reached from the Jordan to the 
Thames. He left Judsea for Rome, and the conquest of Jeru- 
salem was intrusted to a young man of twenty-seven, his son, 
Titus. 

A cloud of horror now rested upon the Holy City.Q Its 
condition resembled that of Paris in the dreadful days of ter- 
ror when the prisons were filled with the suspected, the scaf- 
fold ran with blood, and robbers and miscreants had risen to 
rule in the fatal despair that had fallen upon its people. The 
Christian Church had fled from the city, warned by the proph- 
ecies of their Master, and found refuge in the little town of 
Pella, beyond the Jordan. Many of the wealthy and cultivated 
Jews had also escaped from Jerusalem ; but their places were 
filled by a savage company of refugees from desolate Galilee 
and Judaea, the robbers of Libanus, and the zealots of the 
distant towns. John of Giscala led the furious horde ; and a 
fierce assault was begun upon the native citizens, who were 
believed to have shared in the treachery of Josephus, and to 
have meditated an abject surrender to Rome. Night and day, 
robberies, massacres, and civil war filled the streets of Jerusa- 



(*) The Talmuds give Derenbourg only a few anecdotes of the condition 
of the city, i., p. 280. Yet the legends celebrate the valor of the Jews, and 
are all on the patriot side, i., p. 284. See Rabelleau, Hist, des H6breux, 
ii.,p.294. 



THE LAST PASSOVER. 349 

lem. The citizens, led by Ananus, the high-priest, strove to 
destroy the zealots in the Temple ; but on a dark and stormy 
night a band of Idumseans broke into the city and over- 
whelmed the resistance of the priestly faction. Simon, an- 
other brave and cruel partisan, entered Jerusalem and. garri- 
soned the hill of Zion.Q Between John in the Temple and 
Simon in the upper city a constant warfare raged ; their sol- 
diers fought madly with each other on the bridge that joined 
Mount Zion with the Temple ; and united only in the plunder 
and massacre of the helpless citizens, whom they accused of 
being inclined to peace with Rome. Day and night the fight- 
ing went on ; a ceaseless lamentation for the dead resound- 
ed over Jerusalem ; the city was sacked and desolated by the 
robbers; and while Yespasian was sweeping over Jud8ea,( 2 ) 
the Jews consumed their strength in horrible excesses. All 
preparations for defense were neglected ; the stricken city 
seemed filled only with raging madmen. 

The Passover drew near, and in the first days of April, in 
the year 70, the Jews gathered in multitudes at Jerusalem to 
celebrate for the last time the most sacred festival of the law. 
The poor remnants of a fallen nation, they yet filled once 
more the desecrated courts of the Temple. Still the priests 
performed with sad minuteness the various rites ; still in the 
midst of the raging factions the smoke of the burnt-offerings 
arose from the holy altar, and the Psalms of David resounded 
through the inner sanctuary ; still the countless worshipers 
made their way through streets filled with the dead and the 
dying, and went up to the Temple to pray. Still John and 
Simon watched each other from their hostile hills, and with 
fierce forays terrified and desolated the fairest quarters of Je- 
rusalem. But suddenly their rivalry ceased. ( 3 ) A common 

C) Rabelleau, v., p. 301. 

( 2 ) Tacitus, H., v., 10 : " Intra duas sestates cuncta camporum, omnesque 
praeter Hierosolyma urbes." The account of Tacitus is only a fragment. 

( 3 ) Josephus has described with minuteness, Tacitus with a few brief 
touches of genius, the opening of the wonderful siege ; but the narrative 
of the Roman leaves a clearer impression than that of the Jew. Tacitus, 
Hist., v. 



350 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

danger united them too late. Sweeping along the road from 
Csesarea appeared a band of six hundred Roman cavalry, the 
first squadron of an army of eighty thousand veterans, and at 
their head rode Titus, the young heir of the empire of the 
world. At the sight, John and Simon, conscious of their own 
madness, forgot their enmity and entered into a compact of 
mutual aid. Cruel, wicked, remorseless, these savage chief- 
tains were still patriots, and began now with heroic courage to 
provide for the defense of Jerusalem. John had nine thou- 
sand men in the Temple; Simon, fifteen thousand on Zion 
Hill. As Titus rode carelessly along at the head of his cav- 
alry a sudden sally was made, and the Roman commander es- 
caped with difficulty from the fury of the Jews. 

Jerusalem was renowned as the strongest of ancient cities.Q 
Two impassable valleys nearly surrounded the hill of Zion 
and Mount Moriah ; on the north a triple wall and the Castle 
of Antonia seemed to provide an easy means of defense. The 
city was filled with munitions of war, and food was at first 
abundant. The Jews, in their last struggle, showed all the 
chivalry of the Semitic race; they fought with unrivaled 
courage; they suffered with unconquerable patience; priests, 
warriors, people, showed their proud contempt of death, their 
unchanging devotion to their country, their faith in the ritual 
and the law. They fell by thousands in fierce sallies, often 
successful; they inflicted terrible losses on the foe; they were 
always happy in death when their enemy died with them. 
Yet Titus, with his well-trained legions, made constant prog- 
ress. He soon broke down the outer walls, and burned or 
pillaged all the lower portion of the city. Often the learned 
Josephus was sent to address his countrymen from the Roman 
works, offering them pardon and life if they would surrender ; 
always the suffering garrison refused to listen to the traitor. 
They shot at him with their arrows. At last an enemy ap- 
peared within the city more dreadful than the Romans. Ti- 
tus had raised around Jerusalem a long wall that shut out all 

C) Tacitus, v., 11 : "Seel urbem, ardnam situ, opera molesque firmave- 
ruut." 



THE HOLY OF HOLIES. 351 

exterior aid, and famine raged in the homes of the rich and 
the poor.Q The summer of the year 70 passed in horror over 
the ruined city. As the hot sun beat on its pestilential streets, 
as vegetation withered, and only the gray and dusty olive lived 
in the torrid heat, men, women, children died in their stately 
houses ; and robbers, fierce and starving, snatched the last loaf 
from the hearth of the poor. The woes of Jerusalem seemed 
to Josephus to have surpassed those of every other city ; the 
terrors of the siege awoke a thrill of pity in his vain and self- 
ish breast. Yet happier, perhaps, the Jews who died with 
simple faith for their God and their country, than the stately 
historian, the friend of an emperor, who wrote in a Roman 
palaceQ an unsympathizing narrative of their woes. 

Then came that saddest of all their sorrows, which has never 
yet faded from the memory of the Jews. In the absence of 
all grosser forms of idolatry, the chosen people had learned 
to look upon their Temple, its pyramid of terraces, its golden 
gates, its glittering shrine, almost as the heathen looked upon 
his brazen gods. It was their idol and the centre of their 
hopes. The Temple of the Most High( 3 ) had been sung in 
immortal lyrics by their regal poet ; the sanctity of the courts 
of the Lord, the future splendors of the Holy House, had been 
the theme of his perpetual meditation. The nation was filled 
with the enthusiasm of its inspired bard. In all his wander- 
ings at Alexandria, Athens, or Rome the impassioned Jew 
ever kept in his memory the glory of his native shrine, and 
hastened with devout enthusiasm to the paschal feast. To 
him the Temple was the light of the world, the Zion of his 
weary soul.( 4 ) In the season of fruit, the month of Ab, the 
irreparable woe fell upon the children of Israel. Titus had 
pressed on his slow approaches all through the summer. He 

C) See Jost, Allgemeine Geschichte des Israelitischen Volkes, ii., p. 99. 

( 2 ) Josephus probably composed bis dull speeches long after the event 
in his splendid residence at Rome. 

( 3 ) David's solicitude for the building of the Temple is told by Josephus, 
Ant. 

( 4 ) Jost, Allgemeine Gesch. des Israel. Volkes : " Der hochgefeierte Sitz — 
von vieleu Fremden bewundevt, geehrt, bereichert," etc., ii., p. 100. 



352 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

heard with no compunction of the horrors within the city. 
He was told that Mary, the wealthy matron, had cooked and 
perhaps devoured her own infant ; he appealed to God that he 
was innocent of the dreadful deed. His engineers made their 
way into the Castle of Antonia ; he prepared to storm the Tem- 
ple. He knew that around it centred the fanaticism of the 
Jews, and he gave orders for its destruction. Q A general as- 
sault was made. John of Giscala, the patriots, and the priests, 
fought with terrible resolution in its defense. The skillful 
Romans, under the eye of Titus, forced their way into the sa- 
cred courts ; they climbed terrace after terrace, where the pave- 
ments were thickly strewed with the dying and the dead ; a 
soldier threw a blazing torch into an open window of the Holy 
House ; the priceless veils, the cedar beams, the gilded orna- 
ments, blazed forth in a wild conflagration ; the priests killed 
themselves before the altar; and the Temple of the Most 
High was consumed to ashes. A wail broke from the hapless 
Jews more sad than any their own sorrows had ever occasioned. 
It was repeated in desolate Galilee and wild Judsea ; in the 
distant synagogues of Alexandria and Rome. It has never 
ceased : it still breaks forth from every Jewish heart ; and the 
most touching spectacle of modern Jerusalem is that of the 
cowering Israelites, amidst the brutality of Turkish soldiers 
and the mockeries of Armenian boys, wailing over the crum- 
bling foundations of what was once the most hallowed of 
earthly shrines. 

Titus hastened on the labors of destruction. Mount Mo- 
riah was already a scene of ruin and death. Next the Roman 
engines shattered the walls of Mount Zion, and the palaces and 
line mansions of the hill of David were given to the flames.( 2 ) 
No more were peace and prosperity to reign within her walls ; 
never again was the holy hill to rejoice in the consciousness 
of her freedom. The most dreadful cruelties were inflicted 



(*) The Talmuds say that Titus gave orders to burn the Temple, De- 
renbourg, i., p. 289, and refute the account of Josephus, that he wished to 
save it. 

( 2 ) Josephus, vL, p. 8. 



TITUS THE DESTROYEE. 353 

by Titus and his remorseless legions ; the Jews were slaugh- 
tered like some hated reptile, and the Gentiles repaid the iso- 
lated pride of Israel by one of the most brutal massacres that 
mark the annals of war. One million Jews, it is stated, per- 
ished in the siege of the city — a number that can not bear a 
careful criticism. But still worse than death was the fate 
of the living. Ninety-seven thousand prisoners fell into the 
hands of Titus.Q Of these some were cultivated and accom- 
plished priests, some pure and spotless patriots, some indus- 
trious artisans, some fair and virtuous women, some robbers 
and miscreants, deformed with crime. Their fate was the 
same. Many were sent to labor in the mines of Upper Egypt ; 
many were forced to fight with wild beasts in the amphi- 
theatres of the two Csesareas ; one of the fairest and noblest 
women of Jerusalem was seen, in her hunger, struggling to 
gather the grains of corn that fell beneath the horses' feet of 
the Eoman soldiers ; another was fastened by her hair to a 
horse's tail, and dragged, in that condition, from Jerusalem to 
Lydda.( 2 ) The needless barbarities of Titus are perpetuated 
in the Talmuds. 

Yet Titus, the destroyer of Jerusalem, has been painted by 
his countrymen and by Josephus as the mildest and the purest 
of men. He was called the love, the delight, of the human 
raee.Q He was almost a Christian in benevolence, almost a 
philosopher in self-control. But history has at length re-as- 
serted its verity, and Titus stands before us one of those half- 
savage monsters who revel in bloodshed and crime, and have 
yet moments of transitory penitence. His early youth was 
corrupt and shameless; his later life showed little change; 
he was the chief instrument in the horrible massacres of Je- 
rusalem; he was merciful or pure only in contrast with a 
Caligula or a Nero. Nor is it wonderful that the Talmuds 
paint with unusual bitterness the cruel malignity of the con- 
queror of Jerusalem, and that the Jewish writers have never 

C 1 ) Jost, All. Ges. Is., ii., p. 100: "Uiid 97,000 (was wohl glaublich) zu 
Gefangenen geniacht worden." 

( 2 ) Derenbourg, i., p. 290-293. ( 3 ) Suetonius, Flavius, i. 

23 



354 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

ceased to denounce as false and traitorous the pleasing portrait 
of Titus left by the unpatriotic Josephus.Q 

Over the smoking ruins of Jerusalem the Roman soldiers 
passed more than once, destroying what remained of its for- 
mer splendor. It is probable that few houses were left stand- 
ing. Only two or three towers, it is said, were preserved. 
The day of wrath, foretold by the Master, had fallen upon 
Zion. If the Christians had retained the sentiment of venge- 
ance, they might have exulted in the fate of their persecu- 
tors. The haughty priests, who had pursued Paul with per- 
severing malignity, had died by the assassin's hand or in the 
amphitheatre of Csesarea. The Sadducees, the murderers of 
James the Just, were robbed of their vast possessions, and had 
fallen by famine or the sword. Of all the great throng that a 
few years before had assailed the venerable Paul in the Tem- 
ple courts, or rejoiced in the torture of James, only a few 
wretched fugitives remained. But the Christian Church, still 
in its apostolic purity, felt only a tender sympathy for the 
general woe. It is not possible that every Christian could 
have made a timely escape from the city ; it is not unlikely 
that many of the faithful perished in its dreadful doom. The 
Church wept over the fate of its less fortunate members, over 
the woes of its country, the desolation of Judsea. When the 
storm had passed away a solemn congregation was held of all 
the faithful. The apostles that still survived, the disciples, 
and nearly all the members of the family of the Lord, assem- 
bled to elect an elder in the place of James the Just. Sim- 
eon, the cousin, perhaps the brother, of Christ, was chosen by 
a unanimous vote.Q TJhe Church of Jerusalem still survived 
in poverty, humility, persecution ; and when the fugitive Jews 
once more ventured to return to their ruined city, the Chris- 
tians probably followed them. Once more the hill of Zion 
may have resounded with songs of praise, and Christian and 



( x ) Derenbourg, i., p. 289. The learning and accuracy of this writer 
promise extensive progress in Jewish history. The story of the Hebrews 
has not yet found its successful narrator. 

( 2 )Eusebius ? H.E. ; iii. ; ll. 



SIMEON RULES TEE CHURCH. 355 

Jew have wept together over the desolation of Mount Mo- 
riah. 

Simeon, whether at Pella or in Jerusalem, ruled over the 
Church for thirty years.Q It is the most obscure, it was no 
doubt the most active, period after the fall of the city. The 
surviving apostles had wandered away on their various mis- 
sions ; Andrew was piercing the wilds of Scythia ; Thomas 
penetrating the Indian shores. The daughters of Philip 
prophesied at Hierapolis, and the sons and daughters of St. 
Peter were emulating the virtues of their father.Q St. John 
was at Ephesus or in exile, and his inspired visions began to 
be read in the churches. All over the world we can trace the 
career of the undistinguished Christians by the swift decline 
of the imperial faith, the violence of the persecutions, the 
countless tales of martyrdom.Q In no later period of histo- 
ry has so vigorous a tendency toward reform been witnessed 
among mankind. From the Church at Jerusalem flowed over 
the world a wave of purity. The gifted missionaries, succes- 
sors of the apostles, but clad in poverty and humility, preached 
in every city and village a spiritual refinement, an ideal virtue. 
" Be honest, be virtuous,"( 4 ) they cried, with the pastor of Her- 
nias. "Be simple and guileless, and speak no evil." 'With 
Clement of Pome, they professed a saintly humility ;( 5 ) the 
way of the world was to them, as to Barnabas, a way of 
darkness, leading to arrogance and hypocrisy, sensuality and 
crime. ( 6 ) 

The gentle voice from fallen Jerusalem touched the heart 
of nations. City after city fell captive to its spell. Anti- 
och and Ephesus, Alexandria and Pome, learned to look to the 
ruined capital, once so hated and contemned, as the only source 
of hope and joy. During the first century after the destruc- 

C ) Eusebius, H. E., iii., 32. ( 2 ) Id., iii., 30. 

( 3 ) The Pastor of Hernias, the Pilgrim's Progress of the second century, 
throws light on the purity of the Church. See Migne, Pat. Grsec, ii. ; p. 
910. The first command enforces the unity of God. 

( 4 ) Migne, Pat. Graec, ii., p. 922. 

( 5 ) First Epistle of Clement, c. svii. 

( 6 ) See Epistle of Barnabas, c. xx. 



356 THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM. 

tion of its early seat the Church of Jerusalem spread over the 
world, and retained, in all its purity, the apostolic spirit of its 
founders. It was the light of the decaying age. The apostol- 
ic choir, says Hegesippus, overshadowed it with their grace. Q 
Then came a period of decline. Paganism mingled with the 
simple ritual of the Church its coarse and formal observances. 
The swinging censers, the processions of gay-robed priests, the 
peal of barbaric music, supplied the place of the hymns and 
prayers of the Church of Paul and James the Just. Images, 
once the abhorrence of all believers, were first tolerated, then 
adored. The saints and the gentle Mary were made to fill 
the place of the Penates or Artemis. Presbyters were con- 
verted into bishops ; the rival sees contended for the suprem- 
acy; the Bishop of Rome became the ruler of the Western 
world. A tyrannical formalism, the image of that against 
which Paul had contended at Rome, and Stephen at Jerusa- 
lem, ruled over Christendom ; the Roman Church began a per- 
petual persecution, more terrible, because more lasting, than 
that of Nero or Domitian ; the Church of Jerusalem seemed 
to live only amidst the humble and the poor, and in the dying 
visions of some inspired martyr — a Jerome or a Huss. 

When the city had sunk to ashes, and Mount Moriah rose, 
discrowned and desolate, an image of the broken law, the gen- 
tle saint in Patmos had painted a new Jerusalem in the skies. 
A fairer temple arose not made with hands ; a golden city 
shone above, where, at the perpetual paschal feast, the countless 
generations of the hallowed dead gathered in its spiritual 
courts. There the fancy of St. John lavished all its wealth ; 
there the streets of the Holy City were paved with gold, and 
all its bulwarks glittered with precious stones ; there met that 
sacred company with whom he had loved to mingle on earth ; 
there a perpetual peace filled the walls of Zion ; there the veil 
was withdrawn from the Holy of Holies ; and the redeemed 
dwelt in the presence of the Most High. Amidst the cor- 
ruptions of later ages, the degradation of the faith, the Church 
of Jerusalem seemed only a vision of the past. 

OEusebiu^H.E.jiii.^. 



THE PASTOE OF HEEMAS. 357 

Then once more the ideal beauty of the early Church dawn- 
ed upon mankind. That graceful virgin, spotless and refined, 
who had shone in the Pastor of Hernias, and gladdened the 
fancy of St. John, broke from the spells of the enchanters, and 
put to flight the rabble rout of Comus. Dissolute churchmen 
and barbarous priests strove in vain to bind anew their cap- 
tive ; the Church was free. The successors of Paul and James, 
hidden for so many ages among the Vaudois, or the "Walden- 
ses, the Lollards, the Paulicians, came forth at the call of Wyc- 
liffe, Huss, and Luther. The Church of Jerusalem, simple, 
lowly, pure, became once more the centre of a wide. reform; 
the Church of Koine retreated step by step, until at last it 
cowers, fallen but not repentant, beneath the pagan magnifi- 
cence of St. Peter's. 



DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION 

Of Dominic of Guzman we are told, upon the unerring au- 
thority of infallibility, that his life was surrounded by a cloud 
of miracles : that at the sound of his inspired voice the dead 
arose and walked, the sick were healed, the heretics converted ; 
that often in his moments of ecstasy he floated in the air be- 
fore the eyes of his disciples ; that the fiercest flames refused 
to consume the parchment upon which were written his di- 
vine meditations ;Q and that, in the midst of the carnage his 
eloquence excited, the saint ever remained the gentlest and 
meekest of his race. Once, as Dominic stood in the midst of 
a pious company in the Convent of St. Sixtus, conversing with 
the Cardinal Stephen, a messenger, bathed in tears, came in to 
announce that the Lord Napoleon, the nephew of Stephen, 
had been thrown from his horse, and lay dead at the con- 
vent gate. The cardinal, weighed down by grief, fell weep- 
ing upon the breast of the saint. Dominic, full of compas- 
sion, ordered the body of the young man to be brought in, 
and prepared to exercise his miraculous powers. He directed 
the altar to be arranged for celebrating mass ; he fell into a 
sudden ecstasy, and, as his hands touched the sacred elements, 
he rose in the air and hung, kneeling, in empty space above 
the astonished worshipers. Descending, he made the sign of 
the cross upon the dead; he commanded the young man to 
arise, and at once the Lord Napoleon sprung up alive and in 
perfect health, in the presence of a host of witnesses.( 2 ) 

Such are the wonders gravely related of Dominic, the 

(*) Vaulx-Cernay, cap. vii. A contemporary account of the Albigensian 
war relates the famous miracle. 

( 2 ) Butler, Lives of the Saints, viii., p. 62. 



THE IXQUISITIOX. 359 

founder of the Inquisition ; yet, if we may trust the tradi- 
tion, the real achievements of his seared and clouded intel- 
lect far excel in their magnificent atrocity even the wildest le- 
gends of the saints. He invented or he enlarged that grand 
machinery by which the conscience of mankind was held in 
bondage for centuries ; whose relentless grasp was firmly fast- 
ened upon the decaying races of Southern Europe, the con- 
verts of Hindostan, and the conquerors of Mexico and Pern ; 
whose gloomy palaces and dungeons sprung up in almost ev- 
ery Catholic city of the South, and formed for ages the chief 
bulwarks of the aggressive career of Pome. The Holy Of- 
fice, from the time of Dominic, became the favorite instru- 
ment for the propagation of the faith; it followed swiftly 
the path of the missionary, and was established wherever the 
worship of Mary extended, whether in Lima, Goa, or Japan; 
it devoured the Netherlands, silenced Italy and Spain, and its 
hallowed labors and its happy influences are still celebrated 
and lamented by all those pious but diseased intellects who 
advocate the use of force in creating unity of religious belief. 
Its memory is still dear to every adherent of infallibility ; nor 
can any one of that grave assembly of bishops who so lately 
sat in St. Peter's venture to avow, without danger of heresy, 
that he doubts the divine origin of the institutions of Dom- 
inic. 

Nothing, indeed, can be more impressive than that tender 
regret with which the Italian prelates lament over the fall of 
the venerable tribunal. Modern civilization has inflicted no 
deeper wound ; modern governments have never more gross- 
ly invaded the rights of the infallible Church. Q One of the 
means, the bishops exclaim, which the Church employs for the 
eternal safety of those who have the good fortune to belong- 
to her is the Holy Inquisition ; it cuts off the heretic, it pre- 
serves the faithful from the contagion of error ; its charitable 



C) Laurent. Le Catholicisme et de l'Ayenir. gives the lament of the Ital- 
ian bishops: "Un des rooyens que l'£glise eniploie pour procurer le saint 
e'ternel de ceux qui out le bonheur de lui appartenir est le tribunal de la 
sainte Inquisition," p. 575. 



360 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

solicitude, its exhortations and its teachings, its venerable pro- 
cedure, its necessary and remedial punishments, have won the 
admiration of generations of devoted Catholics. It has been 
hallowed by the approval of a series of infallible popes ; it is 
consecrated by the voice ,of Heaven. For a time it may be 
suppressed by the action of hostile governments, by the cor- 
rupt influence of modern civilization. But the Church has 
never for a moment abandoned its most effective instrument ; 
and in some happier hour, when the claims of St. Peter are 
acknowledged in every land, his infallible successor will es- 
tablish anew the charitable solicitude and the remedial pains 
of the Holy Office in Europe and America, and the civilized 
world shall sit once more, humbled and repentant, at the feet 
of Dominic and his holy Inquisitors. Q 

The saint was born of a noble family in the kingdom of 
Castile, and from early youth practiced a rigorous asceticism 
that prepared him for his supernatural mission. He slept on 
the bare floor instead of a bed ; his frame was emaciated by 
abstinence ; he passed days and nights praying before the al- 
tar, and the holy place was often wet with his tears. ( 2 ) Yet 
Dominic had been a diligent student of rhetoric and philoso- 
phy at the University of Salamanca, and soon his fervid elo- 
quence, set off by his wasted figure, his haggard countenance, 
and flashing eyes, awoke the attention of his age. A dreadful 
heresy had sprung up in Italy and France ; and while Cceur 
de Lion and Philip Augustus were fighting the battles of the 
Church on the burning sands of Syria, the joyous Provencals 
sung their pagan melodies at the courts of love, and Toulouse 
and Montpellier rang with sharp diatribes on the vices of the 
priests or the cruel ambition of the Court of Kome. In the 
year 1200 heresy threatened the downfall of the Church. ( 3 ) 
The people seemed resolved to throw off the yoke of the Ital- 

(') Laurent, p. 577: "lis [the Church] re"pondraient d'une voix unanime, 
que les charitables sollicitudes et toutes les procedures du tribunal de la sainte 
Inquisition ne tendent par elles-meines qu'au plus grand bien," etc. "Les 
avertissements, les peines niediciuales," are highly extolled by the bishops. 

( 2 ) Butler, Lives of the Saints, a narrative accepted by infallibility. 

( s ) Raynouard, Monumens, etc., vol. ii., p. 51. 



HERESY IX FEAXCE. 361 

ian antichrist. In many cities the priests were driven from 
the altars, the churches abandoned by the worshiper, and a 
simple ritual, borrowed from the Yaudois valleys, was swiftly 
supplanting the pompous ceremonial of Eome. 

To the gay and thoughtless heretics of the South of France 
Dominic opposed his fervid oratory, his sordid poverty and 
austere penances, his fanatical violence, and the iron hand of 
persecution. He believed himself destined to revive the de- 
caying fortunes of the Church ; and he founded a new order 
of preaching friars, that multiplied under his care with singu- 
lar rapidity, and spread into every land. Clad in black cape 
and cloak, austere and fanatical, yet often possessed of rare elo- 
quence and attainments, the Dominican missionaries wandered 
over Europe, and preached anew the supremacy of the Pope. 
The aspirations of the saint seemed miraculously fulfilled. 
Heresy, discomfited and overborne, hid from the light of day. 
It was apparently forever dissipated. The Church ruled tri- 
umphant over Europe, and the popes trod on the necks of 
haughty kings and rebellious nations. But the success of the 
Dominicans was not due alone to their eloquence or their 
austerity ; to their care had been committed that wonderful 
agent of conversion, the Holy Inquisition. 

It is claimed by his disciples that Dominic was the first In- 
quisitor-general, and that he was sent forth by the Pope him- 
self to repress heresy by medicinal pain.Q The Dominicans 
account it the highest glory of their order that its founder 
gave rise also to the Holy Office. He at least laid the founda- 
tion of the wonderful structure. The Inquisition was the in- 
heritance of the Dominicans ; their priests presided at the sol- 
emn sacrifices ; their assistants were the familiars, who moved 
like shadows around the suspected ; and the Dominican In- 
quisitors often lived in unbounded luxury and license in the 
magnificent "holy houses" of Lima or Seville.( 2 ) They clung 



( x ) See Llorente, Inquisition, i., p. 48. 

( 2 ) Schmidt, Moiich- u. Nonnen-Orden, Die Inquisition : " Schon seit Do- 
minions verwaltete der jedesmalige General des Ordens als besondres Vor- 
recht," etc. Master of the papal x>alace, p. 136. 



362 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION 

to their privileges with rare tenacity ; the holy houses grew 
rich from the spoliation of Jews and wealthy heretics. The 
Inquisitor wielded a power before which the great and noble 
trembled ; and of all ecclesiastical prizes none was more cov- 
eted by rising churchmen and ambitious monks than a seat at 
the holy tribunal. The vices of Dominic had been a brutal 
cruelty, a savage intolerance ; his successors enlarged the cata- 
logue, until it embraced every infamy and every crime. 

In the sunny fields of Languedoc, where nature laughs in 
tropical luxuriance, where the soft waves of the Mediterranean 
meet upon its tranquil shores, where the skies are ever bright, 
and a brilliant landscape, sown with stately castles and gen- 
erous cities, with villages the homes of contented labor, and 
farms glowing with unbounded fertility, tenanted by a people 
the most refined and gentle of their age, arose, about the be- 
ginning of the thirteenth century, the most fearful instrument 
of human malignity. Q It was in the home of the troubadours 
and of early European civilization. The southern provinces of 
France, in that dark and troubled age, shone with a cultivated 
lustre amidst a world of barbarism and cruelty. Some traits 
of Grecian and Roman refinement had survived and borne 
fruit in the classic province of Aquitaine. Marseilles had been 
the seat of a busy Greek population, and the worship of the 
Ephesian Artemis and the gay festivals of the Ionian faith 
were not wholly forgotten by the descendants of the tasteful 
Greeks. They delighted in music and the dance, in proces- 
sions and cheerful sports, and it was noticed with horror by 
the rigid monks that the Provencals even enlivened the gloom 
of the cemetery by chanting gay songs around the grave. 
Toulouse had preserved the classic form of government, and 
its chief officers were still called consuls, and its people still 
retained the memory of their civic freedom. 

England, Germany, and France lingered in barbarous indo- 
lence, while the gifted Provencals had filled their happy land 



( x ) Fauriel, Provencal Lit., and Raynonard, Monuniens de la Lan. Ro- 
mane, paint the manners of Provence. See Lavall6e, Hist, des Iuquisit. 
Relig., i., p. 1. 



THE ALBIGEXSES. 363 

with the fruits of industry, and had cultivated a literature of 
song and romance that was destined to give rise to the genius 
of Dante and Petrarch, and was perhaps imitated in the sagas 
of the Northern skalds. ( x ) But the most remarkable trait of 
this gifted people was their vigorous Protestantism.( 2 ) In the 
twelfth century the Albigenses ruled in Provence. A pure 
religion, the result, perhaps, of the teachings of the Yaudois 
missionaries, and of the example of Waldo of Lyons, grew up 
in Montpellier and Toulouse. It taught that Pome was An- 
tichrist, forbade the worship of Mary and the saints, scoffed at 
the doctrine of transubstantiation, and proclaimed a univers- 
al toleration. Even the hated Jews, persecuted in all other 
lands, were received with signal favor in the industrious cities 
of the South. A swarm of heretics of every shade of faith 
lived peacefully together Tinder the mild rule of the Counts 
of Toulouse. The doctrines of the Albigenses spread rapidly 
over Europe. G-ermany, England, France, and Spain are said 
to have abounded with similar heretics, who scoffed at the cor- 
rupt priesthood and defied the tyranny of Pome. The Bible 
was read in every land ; and now began the first of those great 
struggles for freedom of conscience which were continued by 
the labors of Wycliffe, of Huss, of Luther and Calvin, of the 
Huguenots of France and the Puritans of England, and which, 
after a contest of seven centuries, have ended in the final over- 
throw of the usurping Church of Dominic and Innocent III. 

But miserable was the doom of the first of the European 
reformers. In 1208 Innocent preached a crusade against the 
Albigenses, and a savage horde of bishops, princes, dukes, and 
nobles, at the head of their feudal followers, swept over the 
fail* fields of Provence.Q The gay and wealthy cities were 

(*) Fauriel, p. 20, notices the wide influence of Provencal literature and 
opinions. Careful research, will probably show that the people were ev- 
erywhere rebels against Eome. 

( 2 ) " Les pretres se sont faits les inquisiteurs de nos actions," sung an 
Albigensian bard ; but he complained only of their caprice. Raynouard, 
ii., p. 52. O Koine ! " telle est la grandeur de votre crime que vous rne'prisez 
et Dieu et les saints," they cried, p. 63. 

( 3 ) Vaulx-Cernay, cap. vii., p. 37 : " Sus done soldats du Christ ! sus done 
novices intrepides !" cried the Pope. 



364: DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION. 

plundered and laid waste by the papal persecutors; a large 
part of the population perished by famine or the sword ; the 
traces of classic civilization sunk before the barbarians of the 
North ; the troubadours vanished from the earth ; and a dread- 
ful gloom of barbarism and decay settled upon the South of 
France. Toulouse, the home of the first reformation, became 
renowned for its intolerant bigotry ; the industry and the en- 
ergy of the people of Provence died with their freedom ; and 
amidst the blood-stained ruins of the classic land, Dominic, or 
his successors, invented and built up the Holy Inquisition.Q 
It was designed to pursue the Albigenses into their most secret 
retreats ; to penetrate into the family circle ; to plant spies in 
their daily path ; to catch the incautious utterance, detect the 
hidden discontent ; to throw so complete and careful a chain 
around the intellect that even the idea of heresy should be 
banished from every mind. The fierce Dominicans patrolled 
the ruined cities, eager for their prey. 

Wherever they appeared they were received with disgust 
and horror; wherever they passed they left behind them a 
track of desolation. The gentle Albigenses, unacquainted 
with religious persecution, accustomed only to deeds of tender- 
ness and mercy, saw with amazement and terror the pious and 
the good racked by fatal tortures, and burned alive in their na- 
tive cities, the victims of the Moloch of Rome.( 2 ) At Albi, 
from whence the reformers had probably received their name, 
as the white-robed Inquisitors passed through its streets, ev- 
ery door was closed and barred, the affrighted people hid, 
with their trembling families, from the face of day ; a solemn 
gloom settled upon the once happy town. But no sentiment 
of remorse, no thought of the popular detestation, delayed the 
fierce Dominicans. They dragged the heretics from their se- 
cret retreats ; they called upon friend to betray friend, neigh- 
bor to denounce neighbor ; and a universal suspicion destroyed 

(*) See Chronique de Guillaume de Puy-Laurens. In Guizot, vol. xv.,p. 
293, " L'inquisition commenca peu a peu a atteindre," etc. 

( 2 ) Vaulx-Cernay throws the guilt of the war on the harmless reformers. 
Guillaume de Puy-Laurens, p. 226, laments that the Church should be ex- 
posed to the horrible insults of the heretics. 



ALBI DESOLATED. 365 

the peace of the innocent community. At length a fearful 
act of sacrilege aroused the towns -people to resistance. In 
the horrible code of persecution which the followers of Dom- 
inic had invented, it was the custom to inflict the vengeance 
of the Church even upon the dead. They exhumed the bodies 
of persons suspected of heresy and burned their ashes. One 
night the Inquisitors, with a train of their familiars, aroused 
the magistrates of Albi from their slumber, and commanded 
them to follow them. The officials did not dare to ask whith- 
er they were to go, but obeyed in silence. The strange pro- 
cession traversed the streets, lighted by torches, and came to 
the public cemetery. The town was aroused, and a throng 
of people had gathered around the sacred scene, scarcely con- 
scious of the design of their persecutors. At the grave of a 
woman suspected of heresy the Dominicans paused, and com- 
manded the magistrates to disinter the body, in the name of 
the Church. They hesitated ; the people murmured ; a fierce 
rage began to arouse the multitude to resistance. But when 
the officials refused to obey, the Dominicans took up the 
spades and began to remove the earth from the coffin. The 
solemn shades of night, the flickering light of the torches, the 
fatal act of sacrilege about to be perpetrated, awoke anew the 
fury of the people, who now drove the Inquisitors before them 
from the cemetery with violence and blows, and soon after- 
ward expelled every monk and priest from the limits of Albi. 
Their revolt was avenged by the Dominicans with unsparing 
cruelty ; the city was excommunicated ; and a swarm of rob- 
bers let loose upon it by the exasperated Church nearly blot- 
ted it from existence. 

The Albigenses sunk before the vindictive rigor of Eome, 
and the Inquisition pursued a career of triumph throughout 
all the districts infected by the early elements of reform. Q 
In every city of Languedoc and Provence two Dominican In- 
quisitors presided ; the civil power enforced their decrees, and 



(*) The chronicle of William is full of the malice of the heretics and the 
success of the Church, p. 228. " Satan," he cries, " possCdait en repos la 
majeure partie de ce pays comme un sien domicile." 



366 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

every trace of heresy disappeared from sight. A reward of a 
mark of silver was offered to any one who would denounce a 
heretic; every house that had sheltered the Albigenses was 
razed to the ground ; whoever lent aid or kindly offices to the 
persecuted reformers was deprived of his property, and per- 
haps shared their fate ; every cottage or lonely cave in which 
the exiles might find a refuge was carefully sought for and 
destroyed; and the teachings of Dominic and the zeal of his 
disciples produced a system of rigid repression that seemed to 
secure the perfect supremacy of the Church.Q 

Gregory IX., from the papal throne, speaking the language 
of infallibility, declared it the duty of every honest Catholic 
to denounce and destroy the heretics, and ingrafted upon the 
creed of his usurping sect the doctrine of universal persecu- 
tion. The heretic was henceforth held unfit to live. He was 
the enemy of the only infallible Church, and must therefore 
be treated as the Jews treated the Amalekites, as Diocletian 
had persecuted the Christians of Syria and Kome. His crime 
involved the ruin of his family. His home was broken up ; 
his children were driven out naked and penniless; his goods 
enriched the Holy Inquisitors and the treacherous informer; 
and in every part of Europe the papal injunctions were obey- 
ed, at least by kings and nobles, and countless numbers of her- 
etics suffered the extreme penalties imposed by the relentless 
Popes. 

When the new civilization of Southern Europe in the thir- 
teenth century had been so perfectly effaced by the Inquisitors, 
when the Albigenses no longer ventured to defend liberty of 
conscience and mental reform, when the song of the trouba- 
dour was hushed in its early home, and a cloud of barbarous 
superstition had once more settled over Montpellier or Tou- 
louse, the Popes and the Dominicans, encouraged by their 
first success, prepared to apply the vigorous remedy of the 
Inquisition to the dawning heresies of every land.( 2 ) It was 



C) Milman, Lat. Christ., iv., p. 168. 

( 2 ) Llorente, Inquisition, i., p. 55. Gregory IX. would treat all heretics 
as unfit to live. 



THE SPANISH INQUISITION. 367 

introduced in a modified form into Northern France. Saint 
Louis, the purest of his regal race, was one of the bitterest and 
most inhuman of persecutors. He had encouraged the mas- 
sacres of the harmless Albigenses ; he would have rejoiced to 
have made Paris the chief seat of the Dominican tribunal.Q 
But his successors were more merciful; the Gallican Church 
grew jealous of the power of the Inquisitors, and no holy 
houses, provided with dungeons, racks, and scourges, were per- 
mitted to be erected in the cities of France. The French 
kings preferred to burn their own heretics in their own way. 
The royal prisons were often filled with reformers ; and when 
the Bastile, the emblem of mediaeval tyranny, was built in the 
fourteenth century, its first inmate was Aubriot, provost of 
merchants, suspected of heresy. He was afterward released 
from his horrible confinement by an insurrection of the Pa- 
risians, and escaped from France. In Germany the Domini- 
cans exercised their inquisitorial privileges to some extent, but 
were held in check by the independent spirit of the princes 
and the people. Italy was less fortunate, and her rising in- 
tellect was constantly subjected to the scrutiny of the Inquisi- 
tion. Yet the principle, if not the institution, of the rancorous 
saint was applied in every land ; and England, Germany, and 
France met every tendency toward reform by the whip and 
the stake. He who strove to amend his age, to teach freedom 
of conscience, to introduce a modern civilization, was destroy- 
ed by the united bigotry of Church and State. 

In Spain the savage genius of Dominic gained its highest 
triumph. The Spanish Inquisition for more than six centuries 
has awakened the wonder and the horror of mankind. From 
Provence it was early transferred to Aragon and Castile ; but 
its beginnings were modest, its influence comparatively slight, 
and it was not until the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella that 
its fatal tyranny began to sap the energy and destroy the 
foundations of Spanish civilization. Never, indeed, was there 
a land more filled with the elements of progress, more capable 
of a generous and honorable career, than was Spain in the 

(*) Llorentej Inquisition, i. ; p. 61. See Kule, Hist, of Inq., a useful work. 



368 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

thirteenth century. As the Moors slowly receded before the 
vigorous revival of the Gothic race, the Spanish cities retain- 
ed much of the refinement and grace of the gifted Saracens ; 
the countrymen of the Cid had never forgotten the generosity, 
the honesty, the purity, inculcated in their national epic, and 
an industrious and liberal people swarmed over the banks of 
the Ebro and lined the fair valleys of the Guadalquivir or the 
Tagus. They were bold, free, and full of self-respect. The 
brave soldiers, the accomplished artisans, the wealthy mer- 
chants of Aragon and Castile, defended their privileges of free 
thought and free speech against every encroachment of the 
Church or the crown. Seville and Barcelona, Valencia and 
Cordova, were almost republican in their sentiment and their 
institutions; the rights of labor and of the intellect were 
respected ; heretics, Jews, and Moriscoes lived unharmed to- 
gether in many of the cities, and liberty of conscience was in 
part secured by the familiarity of the people with various 
creeds. No cloud seemed to rest upon the fair promise of 
Spain, when the teachings of the Popes and the rancor of 
Dominic fell suddenly like a thunder-bolt upon the sources of 
its prosperity. 

The Jews were the wealthiest, the most active, and perhaps 
the most deserving of its population. Tempted by the soft 
climate, the productive soil, and the comparative liberality 
of the Spanish Government, the olive-colored children of the 
East had settled in great numbers in the prosperous cities of 
Spain. Q They had grown rich by honest toil. The shops of 
the Hebrew lined the narrow streets of Cordova or Seville ; 
and while Moors and Christians wasted their energy in useless 
wars, the capital and the industry of the nation fell into the 
hands of the followers of Moses. The synagogue grew up al- 
most unmolested by the side of the church, and learned rabbis 
celebrated their ancient rites in the devout cities of Spain. 
Acute and versatile Hebrews were often raised to high offices 
in the State, gained the favor of their sovereign, and were 
intrusted with the most important affairs. The highest so- 

(*) Llorente, i., p. 141 ; Prescott, Ferdinand and Isabella. 



THE JEWS PERSECUTED. 369 

cial position was sometimes attained by the Jewish families^ 1 ) 
Their daughters, gifted with the rare charms of an Eastern 
clime, richly dowered, and educated in refinement and ease, 
often intermarried with the sous of proud grandees who 
traced their descent from the companions of the Cid ; and the 
immense wealth of many of the Castilian nobles was due to 
the successful industry of their Hebrew ancestors. Jewish 
money-lenders held half the nation their debtors; the Chris- 
tian nobles and officials, careless and luxurious, often found 
themselves fallen into a servile dependence on the Hebrew ; 
the debt was no doubt sometimes enforced with rigor; the 
rich land, the ancient estates of Aragon and Castile, were 
transferred to the Jewish usurer ; the wealth of Spain seemed 
about to centre in the hands of an alien race. A throng of 
prosperous Jews in every city deserved, by their industry and 
frugal lives, their cultivation and taste, the general favor of 
their fellow-subjects. 

But their success awakened envy; their debtors resolved 
upon their ruin.Q The fierce flame of religious hatred was 
aroused by the teachings of the Popes and the example of 
Dominic. The avarice or the dishonesty of the Christians was 
excited by the convenient doctrine that the spoil of the unbe- 
liever belonged of right to his persecutors. A general perse- 
cution of the Jews began ; and the unhappy people, terrified 
at the torture and the stake, hastened to seek for safety by be- 
coming reconciled to the Church. Every city was filled with 
these new converts who had abjured the errors of Moses and 
received the rite of baptism. The synagogues were abandon- 
ed ; the Sabbaths no longer observed; the abject race con- 
formed with dangerous readiness to the requirements of their 
new faith. Yet the malice of their enemies would not be sat- 
isfied with their speedy conversion, and the persecutors soon 
discovered with secret joy that many of the new Christians, 
as the recanting Jews were called, were still in private attach- 
ed to the Mosaic rites, were in the habit of abstaining from 
the meats forbidden by the law, of observing forbidden festi- 

C) Llorente, i.j p. 141. ( a ) Id., i. ; pp. 142-146. 

24; 



370 DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION. 

tivals, and celebrating within the seclusion of their homes the 
worship of Jehovah. A new persecution broke out more bit- 
ter than the first ; the relapsed were punished with cruel pains ; 
informers were enriched by the plunder of the wealthy crim- 
inals, and the Dominican Inquisitors wandered over Spain, 
crushing with austere severity the most industrious and de- 
serving portion of its people. Merchants, mechanics, artisans, 
men of intellect and eminent statesmen, the chief authors of 
the national progress, were confined in horrible dungeons, 
tried by the code of Eymeric, and burned with novel tort- 
ures. Q 

To complete the extirpation of the Jews, the Spanish In- 
quisition was established in its later form. It was a more 
methodical system than that of Dominic. A single Inquisitor- 
general presided over the inferior tribunals established in the 
chief cities of the realm ; an army of familiars acted as the 
spies of the Dominicans ; a series of holy houses was built for 
the use of the tribunal and its victims; a rigid watch was 
kept over every household ; and a fearful gloom of doubt and 
terror settled upon the land. The Pope approved the new 
machinery of torture ; Queen Isabella, after some show of re- 
luctance, lent it her especial favor. Torquemada became the 
Chief Inquisitor of Castile, and his dreaded name has ever 
been associated with a relentless reign of terror. 

Torquemada, the Csesar of the Inquisition, ruled over the 
Church of Spain like the genius of slaughter. It is difficult 
to compare the degrees of human woe, yet it is probable that 
no pestilence was ever more hurtful, no conqueror ever more 
dangerous, to the human race than this chief of the holy tri- 
bunal in the boasted reign of Isabella. He is said to have 
burned ten thousand persons — his own countrymen — at the 
stake ; to have punished a hundred thousand more with im- 
prisonment in his dungeons, with confiscation and ruin ; to 
have destroyed an equal number of happy homes. But in this 
computation are not included his countless victims among the 
Jews. And these frightful enormities were perpetrated in a 

(') Lloreute,,i., p. 149 ; Rule, Hist, of the Inquisition. 



TOBQUEMADA. 371 

nation whose population can not have numbered many mill- 
ions. The tyrant, conscious of general hatred, lived in a con- 
stant alarm. He wore a close coat of mail ; a mounted body- 
guard of fifty familiars of the Inquisition, and two hundred on 
foot, surrounded him wherever he went : shielded by the fa- 
vor of his sovereign, he swept through the provinces of Spain, 
carrying desolation to the peaceful scenes of industry, and en- 
forcing the exterminating principles of Dominic.Q 

At the instigation of Torquemada, an edict was issued, March 
30th, 1492, banishing every Jew and Jewess from Spain who 
refused to become Christians. Their crimes were enumerated 
in a careful preamble ; the wild accusations of their enemies 
had been eagerly received by the court, and it was believed 
that the Hebrews had intended to sacrifice a Christian in- 
fant in a sacred rite, to steal a consecrated host, and poison the 
Inquisitors with a magic compound ; they were charged with 
perverting Christians, and indulging in impossible crimes. 
The last day of July, 1492, was fixed as the limit of their stay 
in their native land, and whoever lingered beyond that period 
was to be punished with death. The dreadful decree, scarcely 
paralleled in cruelty by those of Louis XIY. or Ahasuerus, of 
Philip II. and of Alva, was received with wailing and lam- 
entation on the banks of the Guadalquivir and the Tagus, 
and a hundred thousand mourning families, often among the 
wisest and most innocent of its people, prepared to part for- 
ever from their beloved land. 

Full of tender impulses, strongly ruled by the ties of home, 
of relationship, and of early association, often connected with 
the most eminent Christian families by marriage and a com- 
mon descent, the Hebrew population employed the few weeks 
that yet remained in supplicating their inhuman masters to 
recall the fatal decree. They cried aloud for mercy; they 
promised to submit to any law, however oppressive, rather 
than be exiled from the fair landscapes of their childhood, 
and the cities and villages adorned and enriched by their toil. 
An aged rabbi, the most eminent of his race, who was well 

( x ) Llorente, i. ; p. 235 ; Rule, Hist. Inq., p. 113. 



372 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

known to the king and queen, knelt, weeping, at their feet, 
offering an immense ransom of six hundred thousand pieces 
of gold for mercy to his people. Again and again he return- 
ed, seeking to move them. Thrice on his knees he importuned 
the hard-hearted Ferdinand. " I wearied myself," he relates, 
" to madness in striving to win their compassion ; I besought 
all the councilors and princes." But Isabella interposed, ruled 
by the priests, and Torquemada forbade the reversal of the 
order. Ferdinand, tempted by the rich offering of the Jews, 
might have yielded to their prayers ; Isabella was inclined to 
the side of mercy ; Torquemada rushed into the room where 
they were deliberating, and cried out, " Judas sold his Master 
for thirty pieces of silver ; your highnesses are about to sell 
him a second time for thirty thousand." He flung a crucifix 
upon the table before them. " Sell Him if you will," he ex- 
claimed, and fled from their presence.Q His fanatical appeal 
was successful ; the prayer of the Jews was denied, and they 
were ordered to leave the country. They were permitted to 
take with them no gold nor silver, and were cast out, impov- 
erished, among strangers. 

Torquemada offered them baptism and reconciliation to the 
Church, but few submitted. He then forbade all Christians 
from having any intercourse with them, or affording them 
food or shelter. In July, the mournful emigration began, 
and eight hundred thousand persons, in long and sad proces- 
sions, made their way to the sea-ports and frontiers of Spain. 
The Jews had exchanged their fine houses, their rich vine- 
yards and fair estates, for articles of little value ; had aban- 
doned their synagogues to the Christians, and traveled on 
foot, on horseback, or in wagons, on their melancholy jour- 
ney. Some had concealed small quantities of gold in their 
baggage ; some even swallowed their golden ducats to escape 
the rigorous search. The rich defrayed the expenses of the 
poor with unstinted generosity ; the strong helped the weak ; 
women walked through the weary journey bearing their in- 
fants at their breasts ; and the sick and aged often died upon 

0) Rule, Hist. Inq> ? p. 112. 



FATE OF TEE SPANISH JEWS. 373 

the way. Even the Christians wept as they watched the faint- 
ing travelers, and besought them to be converted; but very 
few consented. The rabbis strove to encourage them with 
cheerful words, and made the youths and the women sing or 
play on pipes and tabors to soothe their sorrow. The sweet 
songs of Israel floated with touching melody over the path- 
way of the departing exiles.Q 

How fair and graceful women, reared in luxurious ease, and 
learned and accomplished men, the best scholars of their age, 
perished in the crowded ships, or died starving in the burning 
heats of Africa and Syria — how fevers, famine, storm, and 
quicksands preyed upon the disheartened host — how mothers 
sold their children for bread — how faithful Israelites often 
preferred death to the violation of their ancient law — what 
infinite woes oppressed the victims of Torquemada, is told by 
contemporary writers with simple and startling accuracy ; and 
we can well beiieve that in the last years of his life the Inquis- 
itor's conscience was oppressed by no visionary terrors ; that 
he lived in constant fear of assassination ; and that the hor- 
rors he had inflicted were in some measure avenged. Hated 
and contemned by his countrymen, he might well fear their 
rage. The people of Spain abhorred the Inquisitor and the 
Inquisition. They felt its impolicy, and saw that it aimed its 
most deadly blows against the purest and best of their con- 
temporaries ; but their opposition was overwhelmed by the 
feudal and priestly caste, and the labor and intellect of Spain 
began swiftly to decline. 

Yet the Inquisition had its birth at a moment of singular 
national prosperity. Granada had fallen when Torquemada 
issued his edict ; Spain was united from the Pyrenees to Gi- 
braltar ; a grave and thoughtful mariner was soon to sail from 
Palos, on an expedition that was to bring immortal renown to 
the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. The New World was 
added to their dominions ; while the voyage of Gama, not 
long after, opened to the sister kingdom of Portugal the 
boundless commerce of the Indies. Soon the wealth of the 

C) Contemporary narrative. Lindo, Hist. Jews in Spain and Portugal. 



374 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

world began to flow into the fortunate peninsula — the gold 
of Mexico and Peru, the gems and spices of the East, were 
distributed over Europe from the ports of Lisbon and Cadiz ; 
the Spaniards and the Portuguese seemed to stand in the 
front rank of the advancing civilization of the age. But in 
their onward path stood the genius of Dominic, turning them 
back with the flaming sword of persecution. The holy houses 
and the familiars, the stringent rule that repressed liberty of 
conscience, the silent terror that rested constantly upon the 
minds of men, planted the elements of decay in the heart of 
their wonderful prosperity. There is no more remarkable 
spectacle in history than that of the swift and unprecedented 
decline of Spain and Portugal. The Inquisition penetrated to 
every part of the peninsula ; followed in the track of Gama 
and Columbus ; destroyed the vigor of the most magnificent 
colonies the world had ever seen ; was as fatal to India as to 
South America ; and England and Holland snatched from 
the enfeebled South all the fruits of its renowned achieve- 
ments. 

Torcjuemada died, and was succeeded by Deza, the second 
of the great Inquisitors. He was no unworthy governor of 
the powerful tribunal. His victims are said to have number- 
ed nearly forty thousand, of whom twenty-five hundred suffer- 
ed the extreme penalty of fire. Deza supplied the Holy Of- 
fice with new laws, improved its organization, and carefully 
enjoined that no town or hamlet, however humble, should be 
left unvisited by the Inquisitor.Q Under his successful rule 
the secret tribunal grew into a vast engine of state, whose in- 
cessant blows fell heavily upon the great as well as the low. 
Bishops and archbishops, grandees and princes, were made to 
feel the power of the fearless tyrant ; the Church trembled be- 
fore the Inquisition ; the people murmured, often rose in re- 
volt, and were crushed into obedience. Deza died in the 
midst of a storm of discord in Church and State ; his successor 
was "the learned, the liberal, the munificent" Cardinal Xi- 
menes. To the liberal cardinal, Llorente attributes over fifty 

O Llorente, i. } p, 333. 



TEE MOORS IN SPAIN. 875 

thousand victims. Under this learned Inquisitor the holy 
houses sprung up in great numbers, and within their secret 
cells were perpetrated unexampled enormities. They were 
filled with accomplished scholars, rising poets, pure and high- 
born women, the artisan, and the serf ; and to the magnificent 
Ximenes is due the gradual extinction of the last traces of the 
Moorish civilization of Spain. 

The Moors had filled the lower provinces of the peninsula 
with countless evidences of their industry and their taste.Q 
Gardens of rare beauty, blooming with the flowers of the trop- 
ics; farms cultivated and watered into perennial fertility; 
factories where the finest tissues of linen or silk were woven 
by workmen of unrivaled skill ; palaces and mosques whose 
rich and lavish decorations surpassed the fairest creations of 
the Gothic architects ; schools and colleges whose accomplish- 
ed professors had taught to barbarous Europe the first ele- 
ments of the sciences^-were swept into ruin by the ruthless 
Inquisitors, and faded away with the wonderful race that gave 
them birth. A few shattered fragments, a few modern im- 
itations, alone attest the taste of the Moorish builders. At 
Seville, the Alcazar displays the wild yet chastened splendor, 
the myriad of original decorations, the lavish use of color and 
mosaic, that marked the palaces of the Saracenic rulers ; at 
Granada, the delicate outline and stately courts of the Alham- 
bra have delighted and instructed generations of observers ; 
and the imagination may faintly conceive what was the pride 
and glory of the land when its busy cities, clad in orange 
groves and hidden in verdure, were filled with a dusky people 
cultivated to the highest refinement, and were profusely adorn- 
ed with a native architecture of which the Alcazar and the 
Alhambra are almost the last surviving examples.( 2 ) 

Avarice and fanaticism soon destroyed the feeble Moors. 
They were ordered by the Inquisitors to be baptized ; they 

OLlorente^p.SSS. 

( 2 ) Wells, Antiquities of Spain, p. 327, describes the Alcazar at Seville, 
its court, and orange groves. And Lady Louisa Tennison laments over the 
fall of the Moors amidst their rare creations, p. 386. Cordova, too, has fine 
remains of Moorish architecture, 



376 DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION. 

yielded. They were still dragged to the dungeons of the holy 
houses on suspicion of a relapse. On the faintest evidence 
of having abstained from wine or forbidden meats, they were 
sent to the torture. They rose in fierce but vain revolts ; they 
fled to the wild mountains, and hid in dismal forests. Their 
factories were closed ; their colleges disbanded ; their wealth, 
once the wonder of their contemporaries, melted away ; and at 
length a few impoverished and dejected Moors, the remnants 
of a mighty race, seared by the fires of the Inquisition, were 
banished from Spain (1609), amidst the savage joy of the de- 
vout court and the haughty Dominicans. It is not possible to 
estimate accurately the loss of their native land in the expul- 
sion or the destruction of the Moors and the Jews ; several 
millions of the population perished ; cities and villages sunk 
into ruin ; the most industrious of its people were extirpated ; 
and neither the genius of Columbus nor the valor of Cortez 
could make amends for that fatal check which the prosperity 
of Spain received at the hands of its Inquisition. 

Since the time when the Dominicans had wandered by 
night through the streets of Albi, dragging its affrighted her- 
etics to their secret tribunal, the Holy Inquisition had con- 
stantly advanced, until it became a well-ordered and method- 
ical institution, governed by a code of laws that seemed to its 
admirers the perfection of wisdom and humanity. The co- 
pious rules of Eymeric, laid down in the fourteenth century, 
formed the basis of its proceedings^ 1 ) They were extended 
and improved by the experience of Deza and Torquemada. 
The first principle of its conduct was a solemn secrecy. Its 
familiars and informers mingled in all societies, watching si- 
lently for their prey. The heretic was seized without any 
warning. He was ordered to appear at the Holy House.( 2 ) 
Here he was required to state whether he was conscious of 
any heretical act or thought. He was shut up alone in a cell 

(*) Llorente, i., p. 85. Eymeric composed his " Guide " about 1356. 

( 2 ) Almost the first step was plunder; see Montauus, Inquisition : "Bo- 
norum sequestratio." The accused was asked " an habeat secum aut pecu- 
niary anulumne, aut monile aliquod pretiosum," His goods were seques- 
trated. 



THE HOLY HOUSES. 377 

in order to give hini leisure for reflection. From his dreadful 
solitude, in darkness and despair, he was brought out to fre- 
quent examinations before the awful tribunal ; and if he still 
refused to confess his crime, he was shown the instruments of 
torture. If he still remained obstinate, the torture was ap- 
plied in the presence of the Holy Inquisitors : it was renewed 
as often as his strength allowed. Often months and years 
rolled over the obdurate reformer, alternating between the si- 
lent gloom of his narrow dungeon and the unsparing applica- 
tion of the dreadful rack. Men and women grew crazed with 
suffering, and the strongest intellects sunk into idiocy. At 
last the impenitent reformer was declared condemned and con- 
victed, was given over to the civil tribunal, and graced the 
final festival of the triumphant Church. 

The holy houses of Castile and Aragon had also been im- 
proved. At first a castle in the Triana of Seville was used 
as a prison for the suspected ; but as the Inquisition grew in 
power its residence was called a palace ; its holy house was 
usually a vast and sombre building, strongly built, and placed 
in a conspicuous street of the city it was designed to overawe. 
"Within, it possessed spacious and often splendid apartments, 
where the high officials lived in luxurious ease, and whose 
walls often resounded with the sound of revels and feasts, of 
witty conversation and licentious mirth. But beneath were 
the dungeons and the cells. A long corridor or hall was lined 
on each side with chambers ten feet deep, lighted by a small 
aperture with a faint gloom, and shut in by double doors of 
immense strength. A single prisoner was usually inclosed in 
each cell; he saw no one but the jailer, and was fed upon 
scanty and coarse food. Xo friend was permitted to visit or 
to cheer him, or even know of his abode ; he met only the 
averted glance of familiars who abhorred him as a heretic, or 
of the Inquisitors who condemned him to the rack. He was 
forbidden to cry out, to lament, or even to implore the mercy 
of his tormentors ; the watchful officers enjoined a perfect si- 
lence through the dim corridor, and its crowded population 
were early taught the danger of disobedience. A maniac 
laugh, a feeble wail, alone were heard at intervals in the abode 



378 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

of despair. Q Yet far down below, beneath the surface of the 
earth, were the deepest dungeons of the Inquisition, the pris- 
ons of the most advanced of the reformers. Here no ray of 
light penetrated, no genial warmth from heaven reached the 
chill and moldy cells.( 2 ) Here Lutherans and Calvinists, the 
impenitent Jew, the relapsed Morisco, the English missionary, 
and the Yaudois teacher were held close in the grasp of the 
Inquisition. A company of the gentle and the good wasted 
away in perpetual torture. For them no hope remained un- 
til, at the caprice of some royal Catholic or ambitious Inquis- 
itor, they were summoned from their living grave to ascend 
amidst the names to heaven. 

Such were the remedial pains of the holy tribunal, whose 
memory is still held dear by the advocates of papal infallibil- 
ity. We shall not pause to dwell upon the variety and the 
curious originality of the implements of torture. The inge- 
nuity of meditative monks and fanciful Inquisitors seems to 
have been employed through laborious days and years of vig- 
ils in the wonderful inventions : the machines for twisting 
joints and stretching sinews ; the ponderous weights that 
pressed upon the body ; the stream of water whose intermit- 
tent flow was designed to produce a temporary suffocation ; or 
the thumb-screw and the various improvements upon the rack.( 3 ) 
Yet it may be safely asserted that each machine was well fitted 
for its appropriate aim, and must convey a high idea of the in- 
ventive genius of the disciples of Loyola and Dominic. 

So vigorous, so successful had been the assault of the In- 
quisitors upon the new civilization of the fifteenth century, 
that, like the Albigenses of the thirteenth, the reformers of 
Europe seemed everywhere disheartened or destroyed. An 
apparent unity reigned throughout the West. Huss had per- 
ished at Constance ; the ashes of Wycliffe had been scattered 
to the winds ; the Paterini concealed themselves in the cities 

(*) Montanus, in Reformistas Antiguos Espafioles, vol. xiii., p. 24. 

( 2 ) Montanus: "Angustia, pedore et si inferne est, humiditate, sepulcrum 
quani vivorum carcerem rectius dixeris," p. 105. 

( 3 ) The plates in such books as the Inquisition Unmasked, etc., give 
a trustworthy conception of the various tortures. 



SAVONAROLA. 379 

of Italy; the people of Europe, never reconciled to the tyr- 
anny of Rome, were yet terrified into silence ; an infallible 
Pope, a Borgia, or a Medici ruled unchecked from the bleak 
Grampian Hills to the torrid coasts of Sicily ; and the fires of 
the Inquisition were soon to be lighted in the city of Mon- 
tezuma and the capitals of Hindostan. A halcyon day had 
come to Christendom, and the Church was never more out- 
wardly prosperous than when Alexander VI. sat on the papal 
throne, or when his son, Caesar Borgia, preyed upon the peo- 
ple of Rome. The awful prodigy of a man eminent in crime 
presiding over the congregation of Christians, and proclaiming 
his own infallibility, awakened no resistance in the minds of 
priests or Inquisitors, and the voice of the people was hushed 
in the general terror of the Dominicans. 

One illustrious victim alone had ventured to denounce the 
crimes of Alexander, and to herald the era of reform. Sa- 
vonarola had fled from his father's house in early youth to 
become a Dominican monk, and had given his life to austere 
devotion.Q His first attempts in preaching had failed — he 
stammered, he faltered ; but his fervid genius and his bound- 
less faith soon threw off the restraints of timidity, and his 
commanding intellect gathered around him a host of fol- 
lowers. From the magnificent Cathedral of St. Mark, at 
Florence, in the classical and skeptical age of Lorenzo de' 
Medici, he assailed, with unexampled eloquence, the corrup- 
tions of the Church, the vices of the Pope, and even the ele- 
gant licentiousness of the great Lorenzo. Immense congrega- 
tions heard with delight his inspired voice, and it is not dif- 
ficult to conceive with what extraordinary power such sermons 
as those on the vanity of human glory and the chief end of 
man must have touched the consciences of the impassioned 
people. ( 2 ) Florence was swept by a storm of religious frenzy. 

C) Tiraboschi, vi., p. 1125. He was born 1452. He became a Dominican. 
He began some years after to ascend the pulpit — "a salire sul pergamo in 
Firenze" — but with little success. 

( 2 ) Sermoni e Prediche di F. G. Savonarola, 1846. Delia Pace Superna Cit- 
ta ; Del Verbo della Vita, etc. " Lasciate ormai i pensieri del secolo, e ricor- 
date vi del vostro Creatore," lie cried, p. 34. See Del Fine dell' Uomo, p. 189. 



380 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

At the command of the new reformer nobles abandoned their 
luxurious indolence, and the people cast aside their light 
amusements, to join in the austere observances of the con- 
gregation of St. Mark's. The world was forgotten and de- 
spised, and every eye was fixed on a life in the city of God. 
Savonarola lived in a monkish cell ; but he had early been 
touched by the sorrows of the poor, and his aspiring genius 
seems to have meditated a political, a moral, and a religious 
reform. He resolved to make Florence once more a repub- 
lic, to curb the tyranny of the great, to destroy the papacy, to 
arouse in the heart of decaying and licentious Italy the higher 
impulses of an uncorrupted faith. 

When Lorenzo the Magnificent was dying, he perhaps re- 
membered the sermon on the heavenly city, and sent for the 
monk to hear his last confession ; the preacher came to the 
bedside of his enemy, full of charity and forgiveness. He 
heard his promises of amendment, bade him submit to the will 
of God, but required him to declare that, if he survived, he 
would restore its ancient liberty to Florence. Lorenzo hesi- 
tated ; Savonarola left the room without giving him his absolu- 
tion. The legend may not be trustworthy, but it indicates the 
vigorous love of freedom that was attributed by his contem- 
poraries to the eloquent monk. Soon after Lorenzo had died 
a republic sprung up at Florence, of which Savonarola became 
the spiritual chief ; he labored for the elevation of the work- 
ing-classes, and strove to blend together the whole population 
in the enjoyment of liberty, equality, and religious freedom^ 1 ) 
Yet it is possible that his various and endless excitements dis- 
turbed his reason, and that in his last years he believed him- 
self capable of prophesying and working miracles as well as 
of amending mankind. His generous life came to a disastrous 
close. One of his followers promised to work a miracle, but 

C) "To some," says Tiraboschi, with caution, "he seemed inspired; to 
some, an impostor." The learned Jesuit can not admit that Savonarola was 
a saint, for had he not been condemned ? vi., p. 1126. Eoscoe, Life of Loren- 
zo, ii., pp. 370, 375, sneers at the ardor and hopes of the victim. But Coini- 
nes, c. xxvi., bears witness to the sanctity of his life ; says he did not at- 
tempt the miracle, and was destroyed by a faction. 



DEATH OF SAVONAROLA. 381 

failed ; his enemies seized Savonarola, and dragged him, with 
two of his friends, to prison ; the guilty pope, Alexander YL, 
prepared a commission to try him for heresy ; he was put to 
the torture, was condemned, and, with his two associates, was 
burned in the city he had labored to set free. His ashes were 
thrown into the Arno, and the fair river of Florence is ever 
eloquent with the fate of the great genius that, perhaps, laid 
the foundations of European reform. 

Savonarola had taught that civil and religious freedom are 
inseparable, and his austere lessons perhaps affected the opin- 
ions of the chief of sculptors, Michael Angelo^ 1 ) and the taste- 
ful Vittoria Colonna. But with his death the Inquisition 
ruled once more unrestrained, and the zeal of the Dominicans 
was only baffled by the difficulty of finding a heretic in all the 
wide dominion of the Church. The holy houses were empty 
except for a few sorcerers or magicians, and the abundant 
machinery of the secret chambers decayed in idle disuse. 
Alexander, Julius, or Leo X. had no disobedient children, and 
the people of Europe slumbered in peaceful submission. 

As if to provide sufficient employment for the disciples of 
Dominic, for priests and kings, another monk renewed the 
contest between the people and the Church ; and at the com- 
mand of Luther, a greater Savonarola, the next important 
struggle began between Europe and the Pope. There was 
now no more rest for the Inquisitors. The Eeformation 
made its way even to Spain, and the holy houses of Valladolid 
and Seville were once more filled to excess with the learned, 
the progressive, and the wise.Q Even Italy itself was found 
to be swarming with gentle and cultivated reformers ; whole 
states and kingdoms in the North separated from the infal- 
lible Church, and were only to be regained by fire and the 
sword. The ashes of Savonarola, that had been flung into the 
Arno ; the ashes of Huss and Jerome, that had consecrated 
the Khine, had germinated into countless bands of heretics, 

C) Prediche, Preface. 

( 2 ) Reformistas Antigiios Espanoles, vol. ii. ; Perez, Epistola. Bibles and 
tracts were brought into Spain hidden in casks of wine, p. 10. Seville and 
Valladolid were full of Lutherans. 



382 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

who renewed the faith and the rites of the Albigenses and the 
Vaudois, and who proclaimed the revival of apostolic truth. 

Surrounded by the advancing tide of modern civilization, 
assailed by the printing-press and the free school, the keen 
literature of progress, the discoveries of science, and the 
mighty intellects of the reformers of the North, the Inquisi- 
tors of the sixteenth century showed no want of barbarous zeal 
in their defense of the infallible Church. In Italy and Spain 
their victory was complete^ 1 ) The Spanish Inquisition sprung 
up into fresh vigor ; new Torquemadas and Dezas applied the 
code of Eymeric to every city and village, and banished every 
trace of heresy from the decaying land; a long line of illus- 
trious victims perished, almost unrecorded, at the hands of the 
secret tribunal ;( 2 ) monks were snatched from their cells, bish- 
ops from their thrones, professors from their colleges, and 
grave citizens from their families and homes, to pine in hid- 
eous dungeons, and die at last amidst the flames. The litera- 
ture of the age reflected the spirit of persecution, and great 
poets and historians encouraged the barbarous instincts of 
their countrymen. The descendants of the generous Cid, 
the contemporaries of Camoens and Cervantes, became noted 
throughout Europe for their savage cruelty ; the Inquisition 
had instructed the Spanish and Portuguese in lessons of bar- 
barism such as no civilized race had ever learned, and had 
planted its holy houses and celebrated its fearful sacrifices 
throughout all the vast region that had been won by the gen- 
ius of Columbus and DeGama. 

The favorite spectacle of the Spaniards was an auto-da-fe. 
As the holy day approached on which the enemies of the 
Church were to perish, a sacred joy sat on every countenance. 
Seville or Valladolid resounded with the note of preparation ; 
the great square was filled with workmen raising a series of 
seats for vast numbers of spectators, and the halls of the 

C) Llorente or Rule may be consulted; Moutanus; aud Perez, Epistola. 

( 2 ) Reformistas Antigiios Espafioles, vol. ii. ; Perez, Epistola, Int., p. 
xviii. Two hundred reformers were arrested on one day at Seville; in all 
eight hundred. Perez wrote his consolatory letter to the persecuted con- 
gregation. 



AN AUTO-DA-Ffi. . 383 

Palace of the Inquisition echoed with religious festivity.^) 
The most glorious sacrifice of the Universal Church was about 
to be celebrated; its safety and honor were once more to be 
assured ; priests and citizens exulted that the city of their birth 
was to be purged from the chief of criminals, and that heresy 
was to find no shelter in the streets still enlivened by the 
orange gardens and the graceful courts of the exiled Moors, 
and adorned by the palaces and cathedrals reared from the 
plunder of the industrious Jews. A lavish expense was wasted 
on the national festival. No Roman triumph or imperial 
show could equal in magnificence the great acts of faith of 
Valladolid and Seville ;( 2 ) no gladiatorial combat within the 
Coliseum was ever witnessed with deeper enthusiasm ; no Ro- 
man multitude was ever more eager to cast Ignatius to the 
lions than were the assembled hosts of priests and people to 
conduct the feeble heretic to the flames. 

On the day before the festival the gates of the palace of the 
Inquisition were thrown open. From its secret halls a band 
of its servants descended into the public square, amidst a 
crowd of spectators, bearing banners on which the rules of 
the proceedings were inscribed. For two days the Inquisitors 
took possession of the city, and gave notice that no one, how- 
ever high his rank, should wear arms during the festival, and 
that no private carriages would be allowed on the streets 
through which the procession was to pass. Meantime every 
household was filled with a singular interest — a feigned or 
fanatical joy. The little children who were at school were 
being trained to the part they were to take in the gay pro- 
cession ; young men and women were eager to secure seats 
on the grand gallery, where they could observe the splendors 
of the royal court and the magnificence of the procession ; the 
prudent parents prepared to join the eager crowd, lest their 
absence might provoke some jealous priest. At night the 

C) Schmidt, Monch- u. Nonnen - Orden, p. 159: "Die auto-da-fe waren 
Feierlichkeiten." 

( 2 ) Moutes, Inquisition, in Ref. Ant. Espanoles, vol. v., p. 146 : "El apa- 
rato i pompa con que en el aquel triunfo se prozede, que ni Persica porapa, 
ni Romano triunfo, pueda compararse." 



38i DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION 

interest deepened. The procession of the Green Cross, com- 
posed of all the monks and friars of the city, and of all the 
secret tribunal, assembled at the Holy Honse, and, bearing long- 
white torches, passed through the public streets to the place 
of execution. An altar had been raised on a scaffold in its 
midst, and a large green cross, covered with a black veil, rose 
high over the scene. Around it blazed twelve white tapers 
of enormous size. A low, sad chant was raised by the monks 
as they moved along; the veil was taken from the cross; a 
band of instrumental music filled the air with barbarous mel- 
ody; a guard of lancers and a few Dominicans were left to 
watch the green cross throughout the night, and the monks 
and friars dispersed until the morning. Q 

The first gay beams of sunlight on the festal day were wel- 
comed by the incessant tolling of the great bell of the cathe- 
dral. The people sprung up at the summons, and all the city 
was full of expectation. The King of Spain, the royal family, 
and all the beauty and chivalry of the realm, were to prove 
their piety by attending at the act of faith ; the most holy 
bishops and archbishops, and all the inferior clergy, were to 
assist at the destruction of the traducers of Mary. Meanwhile 
at the Holy House a banquet was prepared for the throng of 
officials ;( 2 ) next, the Chief Inquisitor, standing at the door of 
the palace, read the roll of the condemned. They came forth 
at his summons, fainting, from noisome dungeons, starvation, 
disease, or torture ; some with a smile of triumph, some weep- 
ing in idiotic woe. Those who were to be burned wore a yel- 
low sack over their feeble bodies — a tall paper cap upon their 
heads, painted with the figures of horrible demons ; those less 
guilty wore coarse black cloaks ; some were gagged ; and by 
the side of each victim walked two guards, or sponsors, to sup- 
port him to the place of death.( 3 ) 

It was usually a Lord's day, the hours hallowed by the joy- 
ous memory of the resurrection, when the procession began 

C) Rule, Hist. Inq. 

( 2 ) Montanus, p. 132 : " Splendescente mane, rainistri ac familiares," etc. 

( 3 ) Rule, Hist. Iuq., p. 152. The form of the procession seems to have 
varied at times, but the Inquisitors were always most conspicuous. 



THE PROCESSION OF INQUISITORS. 3S5 

to move through the orange groves and beneath the sunny 
skies of Seville. At its head came the Dominicans, bearing a 
black banner inscribed with a green cross. Full of pomp and 
pride, the Chief Inquisitor and his servants, surrounded by a 
mounted company of familiars, led the way to the scene of 
their final triumph. A troop of little children from the city 
schools came next, the emblems of innocence. The victims 
followed, in yellow robes and towering caps, walking two by 
two. In front of them was borne a banner, on which was 
painted the severe but august likeness of Dominic, founder of 
the Inquisition. Images or effigies of heretics who had es- 
caped the rage of the persecutor came next, destined to be 
thrown into the flames. Ail the authorities of the city, high 
officials and dignified citizens, followed ; then a long train of 
regular and secular clergy, and a crowd of the rabble of the 
town. To the chant of a solemn litany, the various members 
of the procession, led by the Inquisitors, entered the vast am- 
phitheatre provided for the spectacle, and slowly ascended to 
their appropriate seats in the spacious galleries. Q 

Never scene more imposing opened upon human eyes than 
one of these palaces of persecution raised by skillful architects 
in the stately square of Valladolid — a limitless range of plat- 
forms and galleries, encircling a broad arena, covered with rich 
carpets and costly hangings, bright with ornaments of gems 
and gold, splendid with thrones and chairs of state, and so ar- 
ranged that from every seat the spectator might embrace at 
a glance the whole scene of the dying heretic and the count- 
less array of his persecutors. On Sunday, October 8th, 1559, 
Philip II., to prove his gratitude to Heaven for preserving 
him in a violent storm off Laredo, celebrated an act of faith 
at Yalladolid. The splendor of the pageant was unexampled. 
The wealth of the Indies was lavished in decorating the pan- 
demonium, and providing robes and banquets for the eccle- 
siastical concourse. The grand square of Yalladolid was en- 
circled by magnificent ranges of galleries, radiant with gilding, 

(*) Montes, p. 146 : "Las canziones sou las letauias de los sautos," etc. I 
have sometimes used the Latiu text. 

25 



386 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

and hung with cloth of the rarest texture. In one sat the 
King of Spain and of the Indies, with his son, the Prince of 
Asturias, who was believed to be tainted with the heresies of 
the Netherlands, and who was himself destined to die at a 
later period by the hands of the Inquisitors^ 1 ) His sister and 
his cousin, the Prince of Parma, were also there. Three em- 
bassadors from France looked on at the splendid scene. The 
Archbishop of Seville, with a train of bishops, nobles, and dig- 
nitaries of state, assisted at the festival of the Inquisition, 
and the fairest and noblest women of Spain filled the seats 
around the royal gallery. The chief officers of the city occu- 
pied conspicuous places, and range over range of curious citi- 
zens, dressed in their richest attire, looked on, an uncounted 
multitude, and filled every seat in the immense amphitheatre. 
But in a plainer gallery, placed so as to be easily seen by all 
that devout throng, were gathered a pallid and feeble company 
of the elect. Their yellow robes, their sordid dress, their gro- 
tesque and terrible decorations, marked them as the enemies 
of the Church, and the victims of the proud and great. One 
was the Lutheran pastor of Valladolid, who had ministered in 
secret to his humble flock, who had pined for a year in the 
dungeons of the Inquisition, but whose constancy had never 
wavered, and who now came forth with holy joy to endure the 
pains of martyrdom. May the name of Don Carlo di Sesso 
forever live in the memory of the just, when the splendid host 
of his royal and priestly persecutors have sunk beneath the ab- 
horrence of posterity ! With a gag in his mouth, he sat unter- 
rified before his destroyers. Some had wavered, but had not 
been forgiven. Fourteen in the fatal gallery were destined 
to the stake. One was a nun, a woman, gentle, high-born, and 
pure. She had adopted the opinions of Luther, had been shut 
up in fearful dungeons, and stretched upon the rack. She had 
confessed her errors, and her powerful relatives strove to save 
her life ; but she was a nun, and the Inquisitors asserted that 
her guilt could only be expiated by fire ; and the fair and gen- 
tle woman perished with the rest. 

C) Llorente, ii,, p. 234. 



ITALY PROTESTANT. 3S7 

A bishop ascended the pulpit and preached a semion full of 
bitter denunciations of the helpless heretics ; the sentences 
were read, a solemn miserere swelled over the vast assembly. 
and the king, with his guards, followed the condemned as they 
were led away to the place of burning. Here Philip, the Xero 
of his age, his vices notorious, his crinies unpardonable, looked 
on with cruel joy and untiring zeal until the last of the mar- 
tyrs had been burned, and nothing remained of the holy pastor 
or the gentle nun, and all their sad society, but a heap of ashes. 

Italy, soon after the advent of Luther, was threatened, in the 
sixteenth century, by the fearful spectre of modern civiliza- 
tion. Q The Pope trembled on his throne. The German Ref- 
ormation seemed about to swell in disastrous inundations over 
the Alps. Academies of science and letters had grown up at 
ATodena or Turin, whose gifted members were known to hold 
opinions not far removed from those of Calvin or St. Paul. 
Literature and science stood on the side of reformation ; the 
new books of the day were often unsound in doctrine, and elo- 
quent for progress. The Lutheran theories had penetrated the 
cloister, and an Augustine monk preached heresies at Rome. 
The papacy must have fallen had not Ignatius Loyola stood 
at the side of the trembling Paul, inspired him with a stern 
audacity, and painted to his fancy a magnificent vision of the 
renewed Church ruling over the East and the \Vest, proclaim- 
ing its own inf ahibility, and crushing heresy by fire and sword. 

Loyola, the Dominic of the sixteenth century, had revolved 
in his dull and clouded intellect, but ever fearless and ad- 
venturous, a project for assailing the central defenses of mod- 
ern civilization, and crushing it by its own arts. Why, he 
meditated, might not the discoveries of science and the gen- 
ius of letters be condemned to labor for the propagation of 
the Church and the defense of infallibility \ Why could not 
learning, wit. philosophy, progress, be concentrated in his own 



(*) M ; Crie, Eeformation in Italy, p, 372. A letter from Rome shovrs that 
a large part of the Romans sympathized with Luther. For the reformers 
of Naples, see Life of Juan Yalde's. Betts, p. 103-109; and the Alfabeto 
Christiano. Reformistas Ant. Esp.. tome xv. 



388 DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION. 

society, -while all the outer world lay eclipsed in darkness? 
Why might not the intellect of the Jesuits rule mankind, and 
heap contempt upon all those inferior spirits who were too 
faintly educated to discover the divine power of the infallible 
Church \ He would seize upon education and the free school, 
as Dominic had seized upon the pulpit, and make his compa- 
ny a society of teachers. But to the free school he would also 
join the Inquisition. The example of Spain, where heresy 
had swiftly decayed under the rigid rule of Torquemada, show- 
ed how admirable was the remedy of Dominic, how speedy its 
operation. The Spanish Inquisition must be enlarged to em- 
brace all mankind. Its centre should be Rome, the Pope the 
Chief Inquisitor. The Society of the Jesuits should go forth 
on their missionary labors holding in one hand the sword of 
St. Peter, and in the other the sceptre of mental supremacy ; 
and, by an incongruous union of education and the auto-da- 
fe, must modern civilization be reduced to subjection, and 
made the firm ally of the Moloch he would erect at Rome. 

From the suggestions of Loyola grew up, in 1542, the Ro- 
man Inquisition^ 1 ) It was controlled by six cardinals, the 
most active of the sacred college, who were empowered to de- 
stroy the heretic wherever he could be found. ~No mercy was 
to be shown to the enemy of the Church and of Heaven. The 
punishments were to be speedy, the sentences without reprieve. 
A doubtful word, a hesitating assent, were held to be sufficient 
proofs of guilt ; and it was made the duty of every devout 
Catholic to inform against his relatives, his neighbors, and his 
friend. A house was at once hired at Rome for the meetings 
of the tribunal, instruments of torture were provided, and a 
modest beginning was made by the burning of several her- 
etics before the graceful Church of Santa Maria.( 2 ) The Pope 
and the college of cardinals often attended the executions, and 
watched with approving countenances the final doom of the 



( x ) Ranke, Popes, i., p. 157, is inclined to lessen Loyola's share in the 
honor of erecting the new tribunal, but the Jesuits claim for him the chief 
part. 

( 2 ) For various executions, see M'Crie, p. 278-284. 



ITALY SUBDUED. 389 

impenitent. But, as the labors of the Inquisitors increased 
with the rigor of their search, a larger building was demanded, 
and new implements for their 'dreadful trade. The people of 
Rome, in a wild tempest of rage, broke down the gates of the 
first prisons and set them on fire. At length, to defy their 
malice, in 1569, was completed that grand and sombre palace 
of the Inquisition, within whose dreadful cells a long line 
of illustrious Italians have suffered or died ; whose massive 
walls and Cyclopean architecture for three centuries filled the 
minds of the helpless Romans with awe or hate; and whose 
dungeons, pitfalls, and secret machinery have but recently 
been exposed, by a happy revolution, to the light of modern 
civilization. Q The Pope, Pius V., now assumed the title of 
Supreme Inquisitor. The successors of St. Peter have never 
ceased to hold that eminent position ; and it is the duty, the 
right, and perhaps the desire of Pius IX., as it was once of 
Pius V., to inflict upon every heretic the remedial pains of the 
holy tribunal. 

Consternation filled all Italy as the ministers of the new 
tribunal penetrated into every city and village, and struck 
down their victims with relentless speed. ( 2 ) Every day at 
Pome, in 1568, a heretic died ; the jails were filled with the 
suspected ; in the rural districts great numbers of Protestants 
were seen making their way toward the Alps. The Inquisitors 
hunted their flying victims with unequaled success ; men of 
science, of letters, and of elegant cultivation, fled from Italy to 
the shelter of the North. The academies of Modena and Turin 
were silenced or dissolved, and Venice lamented in silence the 
loss of its industrious heretics and the ruin of its prosperity. 
It is quite impossible, indeed, to estimate too highly the woes 
inflicted upon Italy and upon mankind, upon letters, science, 
and the industrial arts, by the series of Popes who, as Supreme 
Inquisitors, struck down the most eminent men of their age, 



( : ) The building was partly destroyed in 1808, and another built in 1825. 

( 2 ) Ranke, Popes, Inquisition, gives some of the details. See Reformistas 
Antigiios Espafioles, tome xv., Int., p. xxxv. et seq. Carnessechi, the friend 
of Vald6s, was one of the victims. 



390 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

and aroused throughout Europe the flames of religious strife ; 
who burned a Bruno, persecuted a Galileo ; and who taught 
the half -savage Europeans to extirpate the Huguenots in 
France, and chase the Hollanders to the walls of Leyden. As 
Supreme Inquisitors the Popes have never ceased to inculcate 
the destruction of the heretic, and the high privilege is still 
openly claimed by the last Pope and the ]ast council of sup- 
pressing heresy by force. 

Generations have lamented with vain regret and useless in- 
dignation the dark cloud of sorrow and shame that fell upon 
the illustrious old age of him, the glory of modern science, 
who first unfolded the machinery of the heavens ; who opened 
to mankind the magnificent scenery of the skies ; who pierced 
the spacious firmament, and revealed the most wonderful of 
the works of God. The greatest, and perhaps the wisest, of 
all the victims of the Holy Office was Galileo Galilei.Q He 
was born at Pisa, in 1564, when the rigor of the Inquisition 
was just beginning to crush the intellectual energy of Italy. 
He gave himself to scientific studies, and was early renowned 
over Europe as the most active of discoverers. He was made 
professor at Pisa, Padua, and Florence ; his lectures were at- 
tended by archdukes and princes, and by a yet more noble 
band of ardent disciples ; his generosity to his mother, his sis- 
ters, and his friends kept him poor ; yet he was constantly 
covered with honors and emoluments, and his incessant labors 
were ever rewarded by discoveries in almost every branch of 
science. 

To crown his prosperity and complete the splendor of his 
renown, Galileo, in 1609, chanced upon one of those inventions 
that in all the annals of science have most struck the imagina- 
tions of men. He had invented the telescope. The wonder- 
ful instrument, even in its infancy, delighted and astonished 
his age. Europe lavished its honors and its applause upon 
the Tuscan artist, who had given to his race new fields of 
knowledge and a boundless realm of speculation. The sena- 
tors and nobles of Yenice climbed their highest campaniles, and 

( ! ) Nellij Vita del Galileo : Tiraboschi, p. 8. 



GALILEO. 391 

saw through Galileo's telescope distant islands and shores, that 
had never been visible before, approach and grow distinct, and 
watched their galleys, laden with the wealth of commerce, ad- 
vance and recede far down the Adriatic. ( : j The merchants of 
the City of the Sea felt at once the priceless value of the in- 
vention. But when Galileo turned his telescope to the heav- 
ens, a new series of discoveries broke suddenly upon his fancy, 
so unlocked for and so entrancing as have fallen to the lot of 
no other man. The moon revealed the rivers and mountains 
on her spotty globe — her caverns and volcanoes, her arid plains 
and dusky hollows ; planets were seen for the first time encir- 
cled by their attendant moons ;(*) the ALilky- Way dissolved into 
countless stars ; the tangled threads of the Pleiades were swift- 
ly unraveled: and the huge orb of Saturn, the giant of the 
planets, appeared belted by its luminous rings, and covered 
with exterior veils of glory. The majestic depths of the heav- 
ens, never before pierced by mortal eye. were found swarming 
with hosts of stars and radiant with islands of light : and the 
magnificent vision which had filled the fancy of the Hebrew 
poet with a sense of his own insignificance and of the omnip- 
otence of his Creator, was adorned with a thousand novel beau- 
ties and surpassing wonders at the touch of Galileo. 

The philosopher could little have foreseen the dangers that 
surrounded him in the moment of his unprecedented success. 
He heard calmly the applauses of Em-ope, and modestly re- 
ceived the honors heaped upon him. Animated by the favor 
of his age, he pursued his researches with ceaseless ardor, and 
added each year to the sum of human knowledge. He strove 
to penetrate the secret of the heavens ; to separate into accu- 
rate divisions its grand machinery, and fix the place, the or- 
bit, and the aim of suns and planets. At length the theo- 
ry, which had been suggested by Copernicus, but which was 
proved alone by his own discoveries, and made intelligible by 



(*) Xelli. Vita del Galileo, i.. p. 165. The invention is claimed for the 
Dutch and the Jesuits. ,; Sparsasi la fama nella Veneta metropoli di es- 
sere stata construita questa niacehina." etc.. i., pp. 16-5. 166. 

( 2 )Xelli.i..p. 199. 



392 DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION. 

his clear argument, was announced to the world, and Galileo 
declared that the solid earth was ever in motion, circling round 
the sun.Q " It moves !" he cried, with boundless ardor ; and 
men listened to him with astonishment, awe, and doubt. 

Few, indeed, in the dawn of the seventeenth century, were 
willing to receive the revelation of the Tuscan artist, or to ac- 
cept that principle which was to form the elementary faith of 
modern science, which was to become as familiar to civilized 
man as his alphabet, by which suns were to be measured, plan- 
ets weighed, and comets tracked in their wild flight through 
unbounded space ; which was to fire the genius of a Newton 
and a Herschel, and conduct the minds of men to a familiar 
acquaintance with the skies. Who could believe that the solid 
globe, with its mountains and seas, its mighty empires, and its 
busy tenants, was ever rushing swiftly around its immovable 
sun ? Every sense seemed to contradict the announcement of 
science. Sight taught that the heavens moved around the 
earth ; none felt the tremor of incessant motion ; no ear could 
catch the music of the spheres. Ignorance derided the new 
theory ; philosophers of the Ptolemaic school opposed it with 
vigorous arguments ; and truth seemed about to die out in the 
clamor of the multitude and the hostility of rival sects. 

Galileo might have despised or pitied the violence of his sci- 
entific foes, but he soon found himself drawn within the toils 
of that secret tribunal which aspired to hold in check the pro- 
gressive thought of Italy. In his scientific enthusiasm the 
philosopher had uttered heresy. A fierce Dominican, in a la- 
bored essay, detected the unpardonable error. It was heresy 
to say that the earth moves. The infallible Church had de- 
clared that it stood still.( a ) How could a vain philosopher pre- 
sume to know more than Popes, councils, fathers, who had all 
strictly maintained the Ptolemaic theory % Such presumption 
could not be borne, and Galileo was summoned by the Inquis- 
itors before the tribunal of Kome. It is possible that some 
trace of shame, some fear of perpetual infamy, the aid of his 
royal friends, and the compassion of the Pope, may have led 

(») Tiraboschi, viii., p. 190. ( 2 ) Nelli, I, p. 96. 



GALILEO'S CRIME. 393 

the congregation of cardinals to soften the pains inflicted upon 
their illustrious prisoner, and they only demanded that he 
should abandon forever the fearful heresy of Copernicus. He 
consented, abjured his scientific errors, and was admitted once 
more to the bosom of the Church. Yet he must have felt his 
degradation keenly ; and his firm and manly intellect, buoy- 
ant and ever joyous, could only have recovered slowly from 
its subjection and dishonor. 

Fourteen years rolled away in ceaseless study. The pros- 
perous manhood of Galileo declined into feeble old age. His 
hair and beard were white as snow ; his eyes, that had first 
pierced the depths of the heavens, were growing dim ; his 
health decayed, and he was often prostrated by disease. (*) 
Poverty, too, had come upon him in his old age, and his sal- 
ary was taken away. His generosity, that had never failed, 
had left him little for his own support. Yet his cheerful and 
active intellect was still fertile in resources, and he had amused 
the decline of life by enlarging and perfecting his theory of 
the skies ; truth ever grew more dear to him ; the prospect of 
immortal renown blinded him to his danger, and he resolved to 
proclaim once more, in defiance of the Pope, the Church, and 
the Inquisition, the unchangeable law of the solar system.( 2 ) 
He composed those graceful and witty dialogues in which the 
acute Salviati and Sagredo rally the dull Simplicio on his be- 
lief in the antiquated errors of Ptolemy, and gave them (1632), 
with wide applause, to the Italian public. 

Horror and indignation awoke in the breasts of the Holy 
Inquisitors when they discovered the design of the popular 
book ; and Pope Urban YIIL, who was thought to be intend- 
ed in the character of Simplicio, was filled with senile rage. 
The Jesuits, who had envied the scientific glory of Galileo, 
pressed for his destruction ; the Dominicans pursued him with 
unsparing denunciations. He was summoned to Rome to un- 
dergo the penalty of heresy. Faint and feeble, Galileo left 
his favorite home at Florence, the scene of his joys and his 

( J ) Nelli's portrait of Galileo shows the effect of age. 
( 2 ) Nelli, ii., p. 512. 



394 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

triumphs, and, weighed down by sickness and misfortune, be- 
came the prisoner of the Roman Inquisition. His confine- 
ment was not severe, yet he grew weary and sad. He was 
brought before the holy tribunal and condemned, after a vain 
defense ; his sentence was read to him on a memorable day, 
when the assembled Inquisitors sat in their high tribunal, full 
of empty pride, and the great philosopher, clothed in a peni- 
tential garb, knelt humbly at their feet. It was the triumph 
of ignorance and folly over the humiliation of one of the most 
eminent of his race. 

His sentence was still to be fulfilled. A series of ridiculous 
and degrading punishments was imposed upon Galileo by the 
silly and ignorant priests. He was to abjure his heresy in the 
presence of the cardinals ; to retract all that was said in his 
book; to promise that he would never more assert that the 
earth moved around the sun ; to be imprisoned in the cells 
of the Holy House ; to recite weekly the Seven Penitential 
Psalms ; and to remain for the rest of his life under the watch- 
ful care of the Inquisition. Once more the dull and malicious 
cardinals sat on their thrones of state, while Galileo, clothed in 
sackcloth, was led in a prisoner, his illustrious head bowed in 
penitence, his mighty spirit touched by remorse and shame. 
He knelt, and, placing his hand on a copy of the Evangelists, 
declared that he would never more assert the motion of the 
earth. Thus was Science dishonored by Popes and priests in 
the person of her immortal son. Yet tradition relates that, 
as the venerable philosopher rose from his knees, he was heard 
to murmur, " But it moves, nevertheless." He was imprison- 
ed for a few days in the Inquisition, and was then carried to 
Arcetri, near Florence, where he was held a prisoner for five 
years. He became totally blind in 1637, his health having de- 
clined in his captivity ; ^and at length he died, in 1642, at the 
age of seventy-seven. The malice of the holy tribunal pursued 
him even after his death, and his remains were scarcely suf- 
fered to be interred in consecrated ground. They were hid- 
den, at last, in an obscure corner of the Church of Santa Croce, 
at Florence, and were left without a monument to indicate 
the place where slept the greatest genius of his age. 



TEE FIRST AERONAUT. 395 

Amidst the storm of ridicule and reproach with which pos- 
terity has overwhelmed the infallible Church for denying that 
the earth moves, and for inflicting its rigorous pains upon the 
aged and illustrious Galileo, Tiraboschi, the Jesuit, with the 
ingenuity of his order, suggests a casuistical defense.Q It 
was the Inquisition, he says, that denied the axiom of sci- 
ence; but the Inquisition is not infallible, and the Church 
does not consent to be bound by its decisions. Yet, if the 
Pope, as Supreme Inquisitor, may enforce opinions in science 
or morals that are untrue, how can we be sure that he is in- 
fallible when he acts in any other capacity % If he asserts it 
to be the doctrine of the Church that the earth does not move 
around the sun, either he fails in interpreting the opinion of 
his predecessors, or he declares the Church to believe what 
observation has shown to be false. In either case infallibility 
sinks before the light of science. Galileo's doctrine survived 
his abjuration and his death, and the name of the martyr of 
the Inquisition is written among the stars. 

In another branch of science the holy tribunal was scarcely 
more successful. A learned Jesuit in the seventeenth centu- 
ry first suggested the method of ascending the air in balloons ; 
another, Bartolomeo Gusmao, toward the close of the century, 
seems nearly to have succeeded in the design. He had seen 
in Brazil light vegetable substances of a spherical shape float 
in the air, and imitated them in paper balloons filled with gas. 
At length he formed a larger one, and, having come to Lis- 
bon, proposed to ascend himself in the presence of the people. 
Amidst a wondering multitude he sent up one of his balloons, 
the first, perhaps, that had ever been seen, and assured his 
friends that there was no danger nor difficulty in navigating 
the air.( 2 ) He even offered to carry the Grand Inquisitor and 
all the holy tribunal with him on his adventurous journey ; 
but the clergy shuddered at the impious attempt to defy the 

(*) Tiraboschi, viii., p. 177 : " Ma riflettero solamente che il Galileo non 
fu condannato ne dalla chiesa universale, ne dalla Komana, ma solo dal 
tribunale della Inquisizione." The ex-Jesuit had not forgotten his casu- 
istry. 

( 2 ) Cr^tineau-Joly, Compagnie de J6sus, iv., p. 318. 



396 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

laws of nature ; the Holy Office resolved to interfere. The 
Inquisitors were convinced that the ingenious Jesuit was pos- 
sessed by an evil spirit ; that Satan alone could have invented 
the strange machine. Gusmao was seized and thrown into 
one of the deepest cells of the Holy House, and vainly strove 
to persuade his persecutors that his invention was opposed to 
none of the doctrines of the Church. His arguments were re- 
jected as frivolous. The Church condemned the balloon ; and 
the ambitious aeronaut, after lingering some time in confine- 
ment, was set free at the solicitation of his fellow-Jesuits, fled 
to Spain about the year 1700, and seems never to have again 
attempted to navigate the air. 

Between the magicians and sorcerers of the Middle Ages 
and the acute Inquisitors a long contest raged, and all the gen- 
tle solicitude and the medicinal pains of the Holy Office were 
employed in vain in extirpating the ever-increasing host of the 
servants of Satan. Q The magician of the Inquisition was a 
being sufficiently portentous. He was invested with all the 
learning of the time. He had studied alchemy, geometry, and 
mathematics in the schools of the Arabs. He could raise the 
spirits of the lower world, and call the dead from the grave, 
the demon from the abyss. In some dark and subterranean 
vault, hung with black, in a lonely wood or torrid desert, or 
amidst the ruins of an abbey or a castle, the magician stood at 
midnight, clothed in an ephod of white linen, and an exterior 
robe of black bombazine sweeping the ground. His faithful 
assistant was at his side, A storm of thunder and sharp light- 
ning raged above as he traced around him his magic circle, in- 
scribing it with triangles and crosses, and marking it with hal- 
lowed names. The circle was his only safeguard against the 
raging band of demons. He stepped within the safe pre- 
cinct, and, holding a Hebrew Bible in his hand, began to mut- 
ter his most powerful incantations. Wild cries and fearful 
noises soon arose ; flashes of fire and tremblings of the earth 
announced the approach of the Satanic company.( 2 ) The magic 

(*) Llorente, ii., p. 40-61. 

( 2 ) Del Rio, Disquisitiones Magicae. The learned Jesuit gives ample de- 



ITALY AND SPAIN DECAY. 397 

circle was surrounded by spirits in the shapes of savage lions 
and tigers, vomiting flames, and struggling to devour their im- 
passive master. He must remain calm and without a tremor, 
or he would fall a victim to the malicious beings he had sum- 
moned ; he must awe them into obedience. When they found 
that they could not alarm him, the spirits assumed graceful 
and enticing forms, and strove to deceive him into confidence. 
But the skillful magician knew that they were as false and ma- 
licious as they were cruel, and looked upon them with stern and 
self-respecting eyes. He laid on them his commands ; forced 
them to fly over land and sea, mountains and deserts, to do 
his bidding, and only ventured to step beyond his magic circle 
when the last shriek of the demon host had died on the mid- 
night air. But the harmless pretender often found himself in 
the hands of the familiars of the Inquisition, no less treacher- 
ous and cruel than the spirits they imagined and described. 
For centuries the dungeons of the Holy Office were filled with 
sorcerers and witches. And when the belief in the occult arts 
had long ceased in other lands, an unlucky sorceress was burn- 
ed, in 1780, by the Spanish Inquisition. 

Thus in the sixteenth century was the tide of modern civ- 
ilization rolled back from Italy and Spain, and every trace of 
resistance to the papal power had disappeared before the iron 
rule of the disciples of Dominic and Loyola. A new ambition 
inspired the Supreme Inquisitor, the Jesuits, and Philip of 
Spain : encouraged by their unquestioned triumph, they now 
proposed to extirpate the heretics of Germany and France, 
and bring back rebellious England to a modest submission to 
the ancient faith. 

How nearly this design had succeeded, how almost resistless 
was the progress of the Inquisition and of the papal armies in 
the close of the sixteenth century, can scarcely be reviewed 
without a shudder by the historical inquirer who remembers 
the fate of all Southern Europe under the remorseless rule of 
its oppressors. That England, Germany, and the Scandinavian 
kingdoms escaped the doom of Italy and Spain, is one of the 
marvels of history. The Popes deposed Elizabeth, absolved 
her subjects from their allegiance, and aimed the assassin's 



398 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

dagger at the heart of the courageous queen. Had she fallen, 
Mary of Scotland might have ascended the vacant throne, and 
the armies of Philip have swept over the divided land. En- 
gland, already half Catholic, and torn by civil discord, must 
have made a bold but useless resistance to the superior skill of 
the Prince of Parma and his well-trained troops. France in 
this ominous period was striving to destroy the Huguenots ; 
and the Holy League and the Catholic princes were eager to 
enforce the principles of Dominic and Loyola throughout all 
their bleeding country. Supine and enfeebled, the German 
Protestants awaited that storm of ruin which the vigor of 
Wallenstein was soon to let loose upon the whole region, from 
the Danube to the Baltic coast. The war in the Netherlands 
was raging with unexampled horrors ; the Inquisition was tri- 
umphant over the deserted ruins of Antwerp, and the silent 
streets of Brussels and Ghent ; and Holland, the last fortress 
of European civilization, had Elizabeth died or the League been 
successful, must have sunk forever in despotism and oblivion. 
Of all the disastrous wars of this unhappy age, clouded with 
human calamity, the lessons of Dominic and the zeal of the 
Inquisitors were the primal cause. To plant the Inquisition 
in the cities of the Netherlands, Philip II. employed all the 
resources of his immense empire, and all the remorseless arts 
he had learned in the schools of the holy tribunal. He was 
eager to celebrate an act of faith in Amsterdam or London, 
and to renew the favorite spectacle of Valladolid or Seville in 
lands teeming with heretics, and filled with the elements of 
reform. His fanatical passion was very nearly gratified. He 
assassinated William of Orange, and the Prince of Parma 
pressed successfully upon the last defenses of Holland. More 
than once Philip had nearly procured the death of Elizabeth 
of England. His ships and his armies threatened to bear the 
rack and the scourge to the home of Shakspeare, Bacon, and 
Spenser. Often it seemed in doubt whether England might 
not be crushed beneath a new Torquemada, and its Protestant 
population perish in the final triumph of the Inquisition. (*) 

(') It is shown by the accurate pictures of Motley and Froucle how fee- 
ble were the defenses of England, how superior the resources of Spain. 



ENGLAND UNDEE AN INQUISITION. 399 

It is a curious, perhaps an instructive, question to examine 
the results that must have flowed from the success of the de- 
vout hopes of the Popes and the Inquisitors — an inquiry* now 
as practically needless as the question of the Eoman histori- 
ans as to what would have followed had Alexander invaded 
Italy. "But the complete subjection of Holland and England 
to the Supreme Inquisitor at Eome must have been attended 
by a change so vast in the condition of mankind as can scarce- 
ly fail to arrest curiosity ; nor can it be doubted that it would 
have been succeeded by a limitless period of decay. The 
English kings must have followed the example of those of 
France. In 1600, Henry TV. enforced a general toleration, 
and France grew in industry and power. In 1700, his de- 
scendant, Louis XIV., had become his own Supreme Inquisi- 
tor, and expelled the working-classes from his kingdom. In- 
dolence, chivalry, and a barbarous passion for military glory, 
made France the terror and the shame of Europe. An Inqui- 
sition ruling in London, and a line of Catholic kings on the 
English throne, must have destroyed the industry of the 
nation, and planted the elements of moral and mental de- 
cay wherever the fleets and colonies of England penetrated. 
Holy houses would have sprung up along the coasts of North 
America, and an act of faith might still have formed the fa- 
vorite amusement of the people from Labrador to Patagonia. 
The chief employment of governments would have been to 
crush heresy; of the mechanic, to invent a new rack or a 
more effectual thumb-screw ; of the author, to celebrate the 
victories of infallibility ; and of the man of science, to defend 
the miracles and the doctrines of Dominic. To such a des- 
tiny were the people of Spain and Italy condemned in the 
prosperous period of the holy tribunal. 

But England and Holland repelled the armies of the In- 
quisitors, and preserved their narrow territories to be the 
birthplace of a new civilization. It was the terror of the In- 
quisition that aroused the people of both countries to their 
desperate resistance. In England, the Puritans, children of 
industry and of honest thought, gathered around their queen, 
and kept the wavering Elizabeth in the front of the Protest- 



400 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

ant movement of the age. A war with Spain was always pop- 
ular ; a raid on Lisbon or Cadiz enlisted the sympathy of men 
of intellect and men of toil. But in Holland the dread of the 
Inquisitors and the horrors of the Spanish rule awoke to a 
still grander heroism a people singularly calm and phlegmat- 
ic. " Better to die together," they exclaimed, " than to sub- 
mit to the slow ruin entailed by the holy tribunal." Indus- 
try and intellect rose in the contest. The laboring classes 
and the men of thought flocked to the free cities of the be- 
leaguered land ; and, amidst the perils of an inexpiable war, 
factories and work-shops were never idle, great fleets thronged 
the ports of Amsterdam and Zeeland, universities were found- 
ed, churches flourished, and the dismal fens and wastes of 
Holland became the centre of the highest progress of the age, 
because they had driven back the Inquisition. 

Discomfited in all their plans of conquest, the Inquisitors 
retreated to Italy and Spain, and here, throughout the sev- 
enteenth century, exercised an unparalleled severity. The 
passion for autos-da-fe grew in strength with the kings and 
the people, and each Spanish monarch celebrated his accession 
to the throne by the popular spectacle. At the great act of 
faith in 1680, the famous, the noble, and the gay attended. 
An immense concourse of people assembled in the galleries^ 1 ) 
The king looked on from eight in the morning, with devout 
interest, until the last rites were performed ; and it was ob- 
served, as an example to all future ages, that his majesty nei- 
ther withdrew to take any refreshment nor showed any signs 
of weariness, but was ever cheerful and composed. A work 
was published describing the ceremony, with all its horrible 
details. The names of the eminent spectators are recorded, 
the pious zeal of the king celebrated ; and the author's pro- 
duction is commended by the censors of the press as worthy 
to be read, not only in Spain, but throughout the world. So 
glorious a triumph of the faith ought never to be forgotten. 

From the year 1700 the vigor of the Inquisition began to 
decline. Literature aimed its sharpest blows at the institu- 

(*) Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, ch. xiii. 



CONDITION OF SPAIN. 401 

tions of Dominic. The free press, which it had striven to 
destroy, covered the secret tribunal with ignominy, and de- 
nounced its most glorious triumphs as more savage than the 
wild orgies of the Carib. Even Spain and Italy felt the ab- 
horrence of mankind ; the acts of faith no longer drew ap- 
plauding crowds at Yalladolid and Seville; the bull -fight 
and the blood-stained matadore supplied the excitement that 
had once followed the Inquisitor and his victim ; and liberal 
priests began to lament the fanatical rage that had covered 
their Church and their native land with infamy. Yet the 
Holy Office still defied the indignation of the reformers, and 
as late as 1763 heretics were burned in the midst of Spanish 
civilization ; the Inquisition still ruled with a mysterious ter- 
ror over the minds of men ; literature, science, and invention 
still withered beneath its frown. The French Kevolution and 
Napoleon swept away the Inquisitors and the holy houses; 
they were restored by the arms of Wellington and the return 
of the old dynasty. In 1823, a Tribunal of Faith punished 
heretics; and in 1856, English and American missionaries were 
imprisoned or banished by the Spanish priests.Q 

Under the rule of its native Inquisitors, Spain sunk into a 
complete decay. Aragon, in the last century, presented a 
dreary waste of deserted hamlets and villages, and of cities 
where a scanty and degraded population wandered amidst the 
ruins of former opulence and grandeur. ( 2 ) In every province 
the same spectacle of ruin met the traveler's eye. Cordova, 
the centre of Moorish industry and taste, once teeming with 
its countless artisans and scholars, had become an insignificant 
town, abandoned by almost every trace of its ancient renown ; 
but its wonderful cathedral, the mosque of Abd-er-Eahman, 
glorious in its wilderness of jasper and marble columns, the fair 
creations of the Moorish architects, its ruined courts filled with 
groves of orange-trees, shading with tangled shrubbery their 
sparkling fountains, its immense and tarnished exterior, still 



(*) Rule, Hist. Inq. Llorente, iv., p. 143, saw the Inquisition abolished by- 
Napoleon. 

( 2 ) Bourgoanne, Travels in Spain, vol. iii., ch. v. 

26 



402 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

revived the memory of the gifted people who had perished 
by myriads under the bitter tyranny of the Inquisition. The 
rich province of Granada was still more desolate. Its thin 
and impoverished population starved amidst the opulence of 
nature — amidst the gentle climate and prolific soil that had 
once nourished the countless subjects of Bobadil, and where 
the tall mountains covered with eternal snow, the rich valleys 
never reached by the torrid heat, the torrents of limpid water 
leaping from the precipices and fertilizing the happy plains, 
the boundless productiveness of fruit and flower, seemed to 
invite the hand of industry, and promise perpetual ease to 
man. Above the fair but solitary scene arose the Palace of 
the Alhambra, almost as perfect as when the victorious Span- 
iards first entered its graceful courts, and drove into exile the 
Moorish host.Q Seville, from whose gates four hundred 
thousand Moors marched out at the entry of Ferdinand, was 
now languishing in a feeble decline — its priceless industries 
slowly passing away. Such was the Spain of the Inquisition 
in the last century, and such it had almost been to-day. 

It was the people against whom the Holy Office had aimed 
its sharpest pains ; it is the people who have at length swept 
it from their path of progress. Since the flight of its queen 
and the fall of the ancient dynasty, no trace of the Spanish 
Inquisition lingers in the land of its birth ; the Bible, for the 
first time, is freely read in Valladolid and Seville ; the Lu- 
theran, the Hebrew, and the Morisco may wander at will over 
the scenes where the great acts of faith were celebrated, and 
the Protestant missionaries preach to attentive audiences on 
the squares where their spiritual ancestors, clad in yellow 
robes, perished amidst the clamor of rejoicing priests. The 
change is startling; it is full of promise for the people of 
Spain ; and we may trust that freedom, civilization, and prog- 
ress are once more to visit the peninsula ; that with the death 
of the Spanish Inquisition the factory and the workshop, free 



C) Bourgoanne, iii., ch. v., describes the decline of Seville, and notices the 
waste wealth of Granada. Andersen has painted the modern aspect of 
Granada and Cordova. Travels in Spain, .ch. ix. 



THE ROMAN INQUISITORS. 403 

schools and colleges, will spring up amidst the ruins of Grana- 
da and Cordova ; and that Spain, under republican institutions, 
may enter anew on that path of progress from which it was 
turned back four centuries ago by the flaming sword of per- 
secution. 

We have no space to follow the desolating march of the 
Holy Office over the East and the West ; to its grim and fear- 
ful dungeons, so often filled with victims, in the torrid heats 
of Portuguese Goa; to the acts of faith of Mexico and the 
calamities of Peru. The story would be the same unvary- 
ing record of cruelty and crime. It would be easily shown 
that most of the misfortunes of Latin America may be traced 
to the Inquisitor — the decay of the intellect, the barbarism of 
the people, the fall of a vigorous race. The revolutions excited 
by fanatical priests have never ceased to spread anarchy 
throughout Mexico and South America, and the Popes at 
Pome have steadily endeavored to overthrow those free gov- 
ernments that have sprung up in the rebellious colonies of 
Catholic Spain. The Supreme Inquisitor still professes to 
command in New Granada and Peru.Q 

But we may pause to sketch briefly the fate of the Poman 
congregation. The Popes as Supreme Inquisitors proved wor- 
thy successors of Deza and Torquemada. Throughout the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries heresy died out in the 
Papal States, and the Italians were carefully shielded from 
the growing blight of modern civilization. ( 2 ) The Vaudois, 
whose missionaries had stolen into the patrimony of St. Peter, 
were nearly lost in a storm of persecution ; the Lutherans fled 
to the hospitable North; literature faded into dull submis- 
sion, and science mourned over the fate of Bruno and Galileo. 
One of the most eminent scholars of his age, Giordano Bruno, 
had traveled over Europe, and had returned trusting to find a 
safe refuge in the territories of republican Venice. He was 



(*) Laurent, Le Catholicisme, etc., p. 581 : " Mais il a abroge" en Aruerique 
les principes et les maximes qui forment la base de notre droit public." 
Pius IX. annulled the laws of Mexico and New Granada, see p. 549. 

( 2 ) M'Crie. 



404 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

suspected of holding heretical opinions, was seized, and finally 
taken to Rome. He was shut up in the new prisons of Pius 
V., and defended his faith in various arguments with Bellar- 
min and the congregation of cardinals. Two years passed 
away. The cardinals grew weary of the vigorous controversy, 
and the poet, scholar, and philosopher was condemned to deg- 
radation and death. In February, 1600, the fagots and the 
flames concluded the argument with a signal victory for the 
Church. 

From 1600 until 1808, the prisons of the Inquisition, sur- 
rounded by a terrible mystery, overshadowed the homes of 
the Romans. Their annals are lost, their records destroyed. 
No footsteps crossed their awful portals but those of the 
priests who administered their secret punishments, and the 
victims whose silence was successfully insured. The armies 
of the First Napoleon destroyed them, at least in part ; they 
were renewed in 1825 ;Q but when Pope Pius IX. fled from 
Rome before the revolution of 1848, the people broke into the 
mysterious cells and set free an aged bishop and a nun, the 
only occupants of the labyrinth of torment.( 2 ) Gavazzi, who 
entered the deserted palace surrounded by the enraged citi- 
zens of Rome, describes the narrow corridors, the fearful cells, 
the pitfalls — the evidences of unpardonable crimes — the luxu- 
rious chambers and stately halls, in which the cardinal Inquis- 
itors had held their revels and condemned their guiltless vic- 
tims. Yet, when the armies of the French republic had re- 
stored Pius IX. to his unstable throne, the Inquisition was once 
more renewed ; the Pope ruled again as Supreme Inquisitor. 
Giacinto Achilli occupied for a time a cell in the ruined pris- 
ons, and was then removed to the safer shelter of St. Angelo. 
He was afterward suffered to escape by the directions of the 
Emperor of the French. 

For more than twenty years Pope Pius IX. has ruled over 



C) Jules Janin, Voyage en Italie, 1838, describes the ruin of Bologna. 
From " cette mine savante vous passez dans une autre ruine, Ferrare," p. 
246. It reflected that of Rome. 

( 2 ) Rule, Hist. Inq., p. 430, gives Gavazzi's letter. Id., p. 433. 



PIUS IX. BEVIYES THE INQUISITION. 405 

the Roman Inquisition, the last remnant of that mighty fab- 
ric which had once overshadowed great states and empires, 
and had embraced all Europe in its fatal chains. If we may 
trust the records of his officials, his reign has not been unwor- 
thy of his unsparing predecessors. The Holy Office, even in 
the midst of the nineteenth century, has proved no empty 
shadow to those who have deserved its attention ; and Dom- 
inic might have recognized in its careful scrutiny of heresy, 
blasphemy, and sorcery the vigorous tribunal that swept the 
Albigenses from the earth. 

Pius IX., when the French arms had destroyed the Eoman 
republic, entered upon his new despotism with all the fierce 
resolution of an Innocent III. He felt himself to be infalli- 
ble. No gem had been ravished from his triple crown that 
he was not prepared to reclaim ; no prerogative that had been 
assumed by his predecessors but was still inherent to the chair 
of St. Peter. The press was laid under an interdict ; the Bi- 
ble in the vernacular was banished from Rome ; Protestant 
assemblies were forbidden; and the thunders of the Yatican 
were launched against the surging waves of modern ref orm.Q 
An excommunication was hurled against Victor Emmanuel 
and the Italians, and troops of Jesuits and monks, of priests 
and cardinals, filled the Eternal City with the clamor of a 
new religious warfare. Strong in the protection of imperial 
France, the priestly rulers despised the united hostility of the 
Roman populace, shut up the Roman reformers in dismal 
dungeons, or mercilessly shot them down upon the Roman 
Campagna. Rome became the last refuge of religious per- 
secution — the scene of enormities over which Dominic and 
Loyola might have exulted with fond congratulations. 

The Inquisition was at once revived. In March, 1850, a 
convention of cardinals, bishops, and archbishops met at Lo- 
retto, the most sacred shrine of Mary, and issued an edict, 
which was afterward confirmed by the Pope, to enforce the 



C) I need scarcely confirm facts so notorious by any authorities ; yet the 
reader will do well to look over the Syllabus and the canons, and the de- 
crees of the Council. 



406 DOMINIC AND THE INQUISITION. 

devotion of the rebellious people. Q Whoever committed the 
crime of blasphemy by offering insults to the Blessed Mary 
or the saints, might be punished with from ten to thirty days' 
imprisonment ; and upon a second offense the extreme pen- 
alties of the canon law might be imposed.( 2 ) Heresy was to 
be punished still more severely ; and whoever should omit to 
inform against a heretic might share his doom. Whoever re- 
fused to kneel in the public way as the host passed by, neg- 
lected a feast-day, violated a fast, or profaned a church by any 
act of irreverence, was exposed to the penalties of the law. 
An earlier edict, which is still retained, enjoined all good 
Catholics to inform against any one who was a sorcerer, who 
had made a compact with Satan, or who prayed or made liba- 
tions to the Prince of Evil.( 3 ) 

These regulations seem to have been enforced with all the 
bitterness of spiritual tyranny. Informers sprung up in every 
district, and priests and monks hunted the heretic in his most 
secret retreats. At Fermo, a citizen died under torture ; at 
Bertinoro, in 1855, ^.ve years' imprisonment was imposed for 
insulting a priest.( 4 ) The prisons of Pius IX. were filled with 
unhappy captives who had offended against the spiritual or the 
temporal authority of the Church. 

Thus, in the midst of the glories of modern civilization, in 
the heart of the nineteenth century, the reign of Pius IX. 
passed on before the eyes of Europe, a living picture of the 
barbarism and degradation of the days of Pius V. or Innocent 
III. Home was a fortress, a prison, and a convent. The 
streets of the Eternal City swarmed with a population of in- 
dolent monks and begging friars.( 6 ) The pompous festivals 
of the mediaeval Church drew crowds of curious pilgrims from 
Europe and America, who wondered or smiled at the magnifi- 
cence of its pagan rites, and too often forgot the woes of the 
murmuring people who trembled before their priestly rulers. 

C) Italy in Transition, Appendix, gives the edict. 
( s ) Article VI., cap. i. 

( 3 ) Italy in Transition, Appendix E., p. 460. 

( 4 ) Italy in Transition, p. 215. The act of faith was not renewed. 

( 5 ) Seymour, Pilgrimage to Rome (1848), p, 187, 



SORROWS AND DELIVERANCE OF ROME. 407 

The Romans wept in secret over their untold oppression ; the 
stranger alone swelled the multitude that assisted at the cere- 
monies of St. Peter's. Few cared to remember, beneath the 
glitter of the illuminations and the magnificence of the stately 
show, that a garrison, half brigand, half convict, gleaming in 
rich uniform, and armed with the most effective rifle, was re- 
quired to suppress the indignation of every Roman patriot 
and maintain the barbarous government on its throne; few 
suspected that in almost every dwelling of the decayed and 
fallen city were impoverished families lamenting for their ex- 
iles or their dead, and men and women shuddering at the enor- 
mities of the papal guard.Q Rome sat separate from the civ- 
ilized world, surrounded by the waste of her desolate Cam- 
pagna, a heap of venerable ruins ; and the last Supreme In- 
quisitor — the successor of Deza and Torquemada — enforced 
for a moment the discipline of Dominic, and, supported by 
a host of bishops and cardinals, launched his final anathema 
against the progress of the age. 

Chanting the hymns of Luther, and patriotic songs that re- 
call the wild strains of the Teutonic hosts that flung them- 
selves upon the armies of Julian, the Germans crossed the 
Rhine, and marched victorious to the walls of Paris. With 
the fall of his imperial ally, the Pope was left without a friend. 
Italy in a moment sprung to arms, to deliver the hapless Ro- 
mans and expel the robber garrison from the Eternal City. 
Fifty thousand ardent soldiers, beneath the burning heats of 
September, encamped around Rome upon the desolate Cam- 
pagna, and awaited patiently on that deadly plain, scorched by 
the autumnal sun and tenanted by poisonous vipers, until the 
Holy Father, after a mischievous delay, consented to resign his 
temporal crown. ( 2 ) A brief assault and a needless waste of 

C) Some earlier travelers — Lady Morgan, Mrs. Trollope, and others — see 
only the splendid rites. Simond, Tour in Italy (1817), p. 297, is more dis- 
criminating. 

( 2 ) London Times, September 24th; Daily News, September 27th. In 
consequence of the delay, great suffering was occasioned in the Italian 
army ; soldiers died of malarious fevers ; food and water were scarce j the 
ground was covered with poisonous vipers. 



408 DOMINIC AND TEE INQUISITION. 

life enforced his submission; the Italian troops and a train 
of exiled patriots swept into the rejoicing city. The Eomans 
met their deliverers with grateful acclamations, and, clinging 
to their side, exclaimed, " Save us from the Pope and his brig- 
and soldiers !" A boundless joy, a guiltless triumph, swelled 
over Italy, and every patriot exulted in the thought that for 
the first time since the fall of the Roman empire his country 
was united — was free. 

The German march across the Rhine was the signal for an- 
other change. The Holy Office was no more. The Supreme 
Inquisitor had been driven from his temporal rule; the pris- 
ons were opened ; the persecuting edicts were of no further 
significance; the Bible was read beneath the shadow of St. 
Peter's ; and Yaudois missionaries from the valleys were al- 
ready planning a seminary and a church at Rome. For the 
first time since the destruction of the Albigenses, it may be 
safely affirmed that the Inquisition of Dominic has ceased to 
exist. 

Yet the sacred duty will ever remain for us and for poster- 
ity to celebrate, with gratitude and admiration, the memory of 
the countless hosts who perished by the fires of persecution ; of 
those generous martyrs who fell in the front ranks of human 
advance. The gentle Albigenses, gifted children of the South ; 
the Spanish Hebrew, teacher of industry and thrift ; the Moors, 
adorned by scholarship and taste ; the Lutheran and the Cal- 
vinist ; the men of science, philosophy, and thought — the hon- 
ored list of the victims of Dominic and the Inquisition — must 
shine forever with a softened lustre amidst the gloom of the 
Middle Ages ; and it is possible that some historian from the 
declivities of the Rocky Mountains or the shores of the Pacific, 
when, six hundred years from now, according to the limitation 
of Cicero, he studies the annals of European barbarism, will 
neglect the useless strife of savage kings and persecuting 
priests to record the fate of the inventors and artisans, the la- 
borers and the thinkers, who laid in suffering and toil the foun- 
dations of modern freedom. 



THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

On the sharp promontory of St. David's, that cuts the tur- 
bid waves of the Irish Sea, stood Dermot Macmorrough, Prince 
of Leinster, planning the rain of his native land. Exiled for 
his cruel oppressions, hated and contemned by friend and foe, 
the royal traitor, says the contemporary chronicle, watched 
with eager eyes the distant coast of Ireland, and caught with 
joy the scent of the gales that breathed from his ancestral 
fields. Q To Dermot of Leinster his countrymen may well 
ascribe the loss of their freedom and the destruction of their 
national faith. The savage chief was one of the numerous 
kings or rulers of Ireland. He was tall in stature, of huge 
proportions, valiant in war, terrible to his foes ; his sonorous 
voice was become hoarse from raising the war-cry of battle ;( 2 ) 
his sanguinary joy was to count the heads of the slain and ex- 
ult over the heaps of the fallen. But misfortune or retribu- 
tion had at last come upon the haughty Dermot : his people 
had risen against his tyranny. And a woman, adds the monk- 
ish writer, with natural injustice, has usually been the cause 
of the chief woes of man, as witness Helen or Cleopatra ; nor 
was this destructive element wanting to the sorrows of Der- 
mot.( 3 ) The barbarous Paris had snatched from King O'Koric 
of Meath a faithless bride ; the Irish princes, like the Grecian 
chieftains, had united to avenge the unpardonable wrong ; 
Roderic of Connaught, then monarch of all Ireland, led the 
forces of his country against the offender ; the nobles of Lein- 
ster deserted their guilty prince, and Dermot fled to Wales or 

C) Giraldus Cambrensis, Hibernia Expugnata, cap. ii. : "Et quasi desi- 
deratse nidorem patriae naribus trahens." 

( 2 ) Girald., Hib. Ex. 

( 3 ) " Sed quoniam mala fere cuncta majora tarn M. Antonio quam Troja 
testante." 



410 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

England in a convenient ship, glowing with hatred against his 
countrymen, resolved to destroy, by the aid of foreign arms, 
the irresistible confederacy of the Irish chiefs. (*) 

Kevenge, or a passionate longing to revisit the green mead- 
ows of Leinster, probably blinded the Irish chieftain to the 
consequences of his design. Yet, however deep and insatiable 
his vengeance, he mnst have shrunk appalled from his fatal 
purpose could he have foreseen through the lapse of centuries 
the endless chain of tyranny he was about to entail upon his 
country ; the miseries of its people, that were never to cease ; 
the cruel triumph of the Norman knights as they hunted the 
Irish from their pleasant pastures to wild fens and dismal sol- 
itudes ; the utter ruin of its ancient Church, that was to be 
crushed beneath the furious bigotry of Eome ; the series of 
perpetual sorrows that were to weigh down an innocent and 
happy race, and make the Irish name from the twelfth to the 
nineteenth century the symbol of national subjection and de- 
cay. 

Nor could Dermot have succeeded in his aim had he not 
been aided by the two most potent of his country's foes. The 
Norman King of England, Henry II., and the Pope of Rome, 
had already resolved upon the destruction of Ireland. Of the 
causes and the results of this unmerited enmity we propose to 
give a brief but, we trust, a not uninstructive sketch. 

From that gloomy period that lies between the fifth and 
the tenth century, when all Europe was desolated by the swift 
inroads of Northern barbarians, and when Goths or Huns 
were laying the foundations of novel systems of govern- 
ment, the island of Erin, sheltered amidst the waves, shines 
out with the tranquil lustre that won for it the appellation of 
the Island of the Saints. ( 2 ) No savage hordes ravaged its fer- 
tile fields ; no papal crusade corrupted its early Christianity ; 
a soft and misty climate made it the perpetual abode of plenty 

(*) Hanmer and Campion should be consulted for the early history; 
Moore is uncritical ; O'Connor more independent. The Four Masters give 
the annals briefly. 

( 2 ) Campion, Hist. Ireland, p. 19, is filled with legends, but is entertain- 
ing. Hanmer relates the miracles of Patrick, p. 76. 



IRISH SCENERY. 411 

and temperate ease.Q From the central ridge of picturesque 
mountains, often covered with bog, or supporting, like natural 
vases, some crystal pool amidst their summits, the soil of Ire- 
land slopes downward on all sides to the sea. It was ever 
rich in pastures and meadows, honey and milk; countless 
herds of cattle wandered beneath its forests and over its 
bountiful fields ; it purchased, with its hides and skins, an 
abundance of wine from the coasts of Poitou ; its stags, with 
noble antlers and slender shapes, ranged in troops over its se- 
questered hills, and herds of wild boar, more numerous than 
those of any other land, filled the thickets of Ulster and Killar- 
ney. There were swans and cranes ; crows, always party-color- 
ed, and never black ; no nightingales ; swift hawks and count- 
less eagles, who could gaze with unwinking eyes upon the 
sun, who soared upward until they almost reached the fiery 
gates of heaven, whose lives were so prolonged that they look- 
ed down from their mountain peaks upon the successive genera- 
tions of dying man, and scorned the feeble race beneath them.( 2 ) 
One strange exception marked the animated life of Ireland. 
At least in the year 1170, we are assured, no venomous rep- 
tiles could exist upon its sacred soil ;( 3 ) no snakes nor adders, 
no scorpions, frogs, nor dragons, were found in its green fields, 
or lay hidden in the recesses of its mountains. In France, it 
was said, the frogs filled the air with their croaking, in Britain 
they were silent, but in Ireland there were none ; reptiles or 
toads brought in ships to the shores of Leinster died as they 
touched the enchanted ground ; the soil of Ireland, sprinkled 
over foreign gardens, expelled the reptile crew ; once only a 
single frog was discovered alive in the grassy meadows of 
"Wexford, and was surrounded by an immense crowd of the 
Irish and the English, gazing in speechless wonder upon the 
unparalleled prodigy. Bearded natives and shaven strangers 

C) Girald., Topog. Hit)., is always unfavorable to the victims of the Ger- 

aldines, but extols the country. 

( 2 ) Girald., Top. Hib. : "In ipsos Solaris corporis radios." 

( s ) Gerald, who studied the country with care, affirms the virtue of the 

Irish soil. The tradition proves that reptiles were at least rare: they 

have since multiplied. 



412 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

were struck with equal consternation. Ghost or apparition 
they might have borne with calmness, but a frog, green and 
vigorous, was never seen in Ireland before. At length Don- 
ald, King of Ossory, a man renowned for wisdom and pru- 
dence, advanced among the thick press of his people to ex- 
plain the omen. Beating his head, and weighed down by un- 
feigned grief, he cried, " That reptile is the bearer of doleful 
news to Erin.'^ 1 ) The Normans soon after, says the chroni- 
cler, invaded the unhappy land, and fulfilled the saying of the 
acute Donald. 

The people of Ireland belonged to that wide-spread family 
of Celts that had once ruled over France, Britain, and the hills 
of Scotland. They were tall, well -formed, and vigorous.Q 
Their hair and eyes were black ; parents educated their chil- 
dren to bear privation and live on scanty food; their dress 
was a thick coat of the black wool of the country, and heavy 
hose or breeches — a plain mark of barbarism to the Normans, 
who still wore the flowing robes of ancient Rome. They suf- 
fered their beards and hair to grow to an enormous length ; 
they built no towns nor cities, but lived a pastoral life, filling 
the woods and fields with immense herds of cattle. Yet, like 
all the Celts, the Irish were passionate lovers of music and 
poetry. Bards, renowned from Cork to Derry, sung at the 
great assemblies of Tara the exploits of the O'Tooles and the 
O'Neils, and took rank with the chief nobles and princes. 
The musicians of Ireland excelled those of all other lands; 
they touched the strings of their native harp with such deli- 
cate and cultivated art, and produced strains so soft yet lively, 
so rapid, sweet, and gay, that even their Norman conquerors 
yielded to its seductions, and filled their castles with Irish 
harpers.( 3 ) The Irish bishop or saint in his missionary toils 
carried his harp with him to soothe his lonely hours. The 



(*) Topog. Hib., cap. xxiv. : "Pessiinos in Hiberniam rumores vermis ille 
portavit." Gerald relates the incident as if of his own knowledge. 

( 2 ) Girald. : " Pulcherrimis et proceris." 

( 3 ) Girald., Top. Hib., cap. xi. : "In musicis solum instrumentis com- 
mendabilem." The Irish airs began and closed on B flat, and were singu- 
larly melodious, 



PATRICK IN IRELAND. 413 

Irish princes swept their harp-strings with rapid touch as they 
made ready for battle. 

But the chief boast of Ireland was its independence. The 
Eomans had seen, but scarcely visited, the savage isle, whose 
inhabitants, Strabo relates, sometimes devoured each other. 
The Saxons had made no incursions on the Irish shore. The 
Norwegians, masters of the Western isles, founded the flour- 
ishing cities of Dublin, Wexford, Cork, or Limerick, but were 
blended peacefully with the native inhabitants ; and of all the 
Celtic races the Irish alone remained free. Their kings were 
elective ; a supreme ruler was chosen in the national assembly, 
and was crowned upon the Stone of Destiny at Tara ; the im- 
pulsive people obeyed cheerfully their native rulers, and only 
rebelled when some cruel Dermot drove them to revolt and 
outraged the higher instincts of humanity. 

Christianity, in its purer form, came to Ireland about the 
middle of the fifth century. Q For six years Patrick, the son 
of pious parents, the child of a priest, had been held in slavery 
in Ireland, and on the hills of Antrim had tended his sheep 
and worshiped God. Every seventh year it was the Irish 
custom to set free all bondmen. Patrick returned to his 
native Brittany, to his parents and his Christian friends, was 
ordained a presbyter, and studied in the Celtic schools of Gaul. 
Yet his fancy must often have gone back to the pleasant fields 
and generous natives of Antrim, where his spotless youth had 
passed, who were still lost in savage superstitions, who sacri- 
ficed the firstlings of then- flocks, and sometimes their infants, 
in the Yalley of Slaughter, and knelt in the groves of the 
Druids. A vision came to Patrick as he labored at his studies 
in Gaul, summoning him to the conversion of Ireland. A 
voice called him in the midnight: he obeyed. About the 
year 432 he crossed the seas to the land where he had once 
been a slave, and preached the simple Gospel to the bards, the 
princes, and the bearded people of Erin.( 2 ) 

(*) Thierry, Conquete de l'Angleterre, iii., p. 195 et seq., presents an ac- 
curate picture of the early Irish Church. 

( 2 ) The only trustworthy account of Patrick is his. own Confessio and a 
single letter. The more recent lives are rilled with the visions and mira- 
cles of the Dark Ages. 



414 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

In the year 432 there were no images nor crucifixes, no 
pompous ritual, no spiritual despotism, no moral corruption 
emanating from Kome. The Imperial City, sacked by Goth 
and plundered by Hun, torn by discord, soon to be desolated 
by Genseric, and reduced almost to a naked waste, harried by 
robbers and polluted by savages, had sunk to the condition of 
a provincial town. Its scanty population, its corrupted priest- 
hood, or its trembling bishop were scarcely able to maintain 
the existence of its fallen Church. Patrick, therefore, the 
humble slave and missionary, brought to Ireland the simple 
elements of an apostolic faith ; he preached only the doctrines 
of Paul, with almost equal success.Q The savage Irish re- 
ceived him with generous hospitality ; he preached to the as- 
sembled nation on the hill of Tara ; he purged the Valley of 
Slaughter of its dreadful rites ; he founded schools, churches, 
and monasteries in the wilds of Connaught and along the 
dreary coasts of Ulster, and Ireland became a Christian coun- 
try, renowned for its intelligencej its pious genius, and its mis- 
sionary zeal. 

For many centuries the island of the saints abounded with 
schools where countless teachers were educated, and where 
scholars from all the neighboring countries came to study 
at the feet of the most accomplished professors of the age.( 2 ) 
While Kome and Italy had sunk into a new barbarism, Ire- 
land had revived the taste for classical learning, and was filled 
with a thoughtful and progressive population. At the great 
college of Armagh seven thousand students are said to have 
been gathered at once ; a hundred schools studded the green 
fields of the happy isle ; in every monastery its inmates la- 
bored and taught with ceaseless industry ; its missionary teach- 
ers wandered among the Franks of Gaul and the Celts of 
Scotland, to Belgium and to Germany, sowing everywhere the 
germs of Christian civilization. Irish scholars established the 

(*) There is no trace in the Confession of any knowledge of Komish 
practices, or any mention of Eome. 

( 2 ) Thierry, Conquete, iii., p. 195 : "Leur ile comptait une foule de saints 
et de savants." See Ware, Hist. Bishops of Ireland, i., p. 4, for Patrick's 
life and the legends. 



IRISH SCHOLARS. 415 

colleges of Charlemagne. Virgilius and Erigena renewed the 
taste for philosophical inquiry; Columban, among the recess- 
es of the Vosges, had taught honesty and independence to the 
savage Franks ; St. Gall, an Irishman, founded in the heights 
of Switzerland that famous monastery long afterward renown- 
ed for its opulence and pride ; nor would it be possible even 
to enumerate the long succession of Irish scholars who in this 
eventful period laid the foundations of European progress. 
It should be remembered that the Irish were the first to im- 
press upon the barbarians of the North the necessity of popu- 
lar education, the priceless importance of the public school. 

A bleak and rocky island washed by the stormy Northern 
seas has become immortal as the home of the most renowned 
of the Irish missionaries.^) Iona, or the Druid's Isle, on the 
western coast of Scotland, swept by fierce arctic winds and 
lashed by the wintry waves, still preserves traces of that sa- 
cred company who once prayed and labored on its inhospitable 
rocks. Here are the ruins of extensive churches, composed 
of blocks of stone five or six feet long ; the foundations of 
ancient schools and monasteries, whence Europe was once in- 
structed ; a multitude of tombs, overgrown with weeds, where 
forty-eight kings of Scotland and a throng of saints and he- 
roes lie buried ; and sculptured crosses and sepulchres, from 
which the grim faces of angels or demons, distorted by time, 
still gaze upon the observer.Q The legends on the tombs are 
no longer legible ; the names of the saints and poets, scholars 
and kings, who sleep in the wild Westminster of the seas are 
forgotten ; yet perhaps no holier or more heroic spirits have 
visited the earth than those who for many centuries made 
Iona an island of light amidst the general decay and degra- 
dation of the intellect. 

Columba, the missionary of Iona, was educated at the open- 
ing of the sixth century, in the pure religion of the Irish 



( : ) Bede, Hist. Ecc, iii. : " Venit autem Brittaniam Columba." 
( 2 ) The tombs and ruins of Iona do not probably reach back beyond the 
tenth century ; are the products of Romish labors. See Pennant, Tour, 
Iona. Wilson, Tour round Scotland, p. 130, notices a " giant cross." 



416 TEE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

Church. He was the descendant of kings, perhaps born to 
opulence and power. But he sought a spiritual crown, and 
gave himself eagerly to ceaseless study. Learned in all the 
attainments of the age, his chief delight was ever in the liter- 
ature of the Scriptures. With Paul he meditated upon the 
mighty problems of life and death ; like Paul he went forth 
to convert mankind. He passed over Ireland, founding great 
monasteries and schools, long afterward renowned as centres 
of purity and faith; he preached in the wilds of Scotland; 
he planted the germs of Christianity in the British Isles. At 
length he selected the bare and barren Iona as the scene of 
his chief labors, the home of his adventurous spirit. He land- 
ed with twelve disciples on its rocky breast, and built his hum- 
ble monastery. Amidst the roar of the angry waves and the 
rage of the arctic seas the prayers and toils of the faithful 
company ripened into a wonderful success. The bleak rocks 
of Iona were wrought into a chain of costly buildings, and 
were covered with a pious and studious population. The 
kings of the North laid their offerings on its modest shrines, 
and claimed the right of burial by the side of its scholars and 
saints. Centuries passed on ; Columba slept peacefully on 
his Druid's Isle ; the fame of Iona spread over the world, and 
its missionaries carried learning and Christianity through all 
those savage lands over which the benevolent Columba had 
bent with affectionate regard. 

Late in the seventh century the malarious influence of the 
Italian priesthood began to subdue the British churches, and 
reached even to the rebellious presbyters of Iona. To Kome 
they had ever presented a silent opposition. Q They owed it 
no allegiance; they followed none of the Komish rites.( 2 ) 
They had founded a Northern Church in Scotland, Ireland, 

C) The acute, learned, judicious Thierry (iii., p. 197) asserts the liberty 
of the Irish Church, and observes the incessant efforts of the Popes to sub- 
due it. u Les papes se bornerent a ne"gocier, par lettres et par messages, 
pour tacher d'amener les Irlandais a 6tablir dans leur ile une hie"rarchie 
ecclCsiastique," etc. 

( 2 ) Bede, Hist. Ecc, iii., 25. Colman cites against the popes the exam- 
ple of St. John. 



THE IRISH CHURCH. 417 

France, or Saxony, that professed to draw its origin from the 
gentle model of Ephesus and St. John, and had scarcely heard 
of the primacy of Peter. By force and fraud the unscrupu- 
lous prelates of Rome pursued and subjugated the primitive 
Christians, massacred their bishops in Wales, seized on their 
churches in Scotland, and at last intruded a Romish bishop 
and Italian rites into the hallowed seat of Columba. Iona 
now lost its reputation for scholarship and sanctity. The 
pestilential breath of Italian corruption dissipated its moral 
vigor. Its missionaries no longer poured forth in devoted 
bands to civilize and restrain the barbarous North. The 
Danes and Norwegians began their savage inroads upon the 
Irish seas, and in 806 a fleet of swift vessels, tilled with the 
yellow-haired worshipers of Odin, surrounded the holy island, 
and landed its vikings upon the sacred soil. A brief contest 
followed. The monks and scholars fought bravely in defense 
of their peaceful home. But soon all was carnage and desolation. 
The Norman pirates laughed as they beheld the island strewed 
with the dead, and gathered their impious plunder ; and the 
chant of the pagan bards celebrating the victory of the vikings 
was the only sound heard amidst the desolate ruins of Iona.Q 
The Irish Church meantime flourished with signal vigor. 
It was in the fresh ardor of evangelical prosperity. Its simple 
elders, or bishops, without any fixed sees, traveled from coun- 
ty to county, confirming their intelligent people in their an- 
cestral faith. ( 2 ) They were maintained by voluntary contribu- 
tions. Avarice and priestly pride were unknown to the suc- 
cessors of Patrick. They founded their ritual upon the vener- 
able practice of the apostles, their doctrines upon the study 
of the Scriptures. No archbishop had ever been known in 
Ireland ; no legate from the papal court was allowed to in- 
trude within the sacred isle.( 3 ) No contributions from the 

( 1 ) It was renewed, and, often ravaged, it slowly declined. 

( 2 ) Thierry, Conquete de l'Angleterre, x. : "Leurs Cveques n'Ctaient que 
de simples pretres, auxquels on avait confie" par election la charge purement 
de surveillans ou de visiteurs des eglises," iii., p. 198. They held no su- 
periority of rank, nor thought of it. 

( 3 ) Thierry, Conquete, iii., 198 : " Ou acheter le pallium pontifical." 

27 



41 8 TEE CONQ VEST OF IRELAND. 

Irish Church swelled the ever-craving treasury of St. Peter. 
No tithes, first-fruits, or ecclesiastical tribute helped to con- 
firm the growing splendor and corruption of the Koman See. 
The Irish bishops firmly maintained their independence against 
the constant menaces of Popes or councils; would consent 
to hold no intercourse with the Court of Home; denied its 
claim to the right of ordination, and consecrated each other 
by a simple laying-on of hands ; rejected the worship of im- 
ages, the adoration of Mary, the infallibility of the Pope, and 
in all their schools and colleges persisted in a free study of 
the Scriptures. With an earlier Protestantism that Luther 
might have suggested and Calvin approved, they inculcated 
and exercised a general liberty of conscience founded upon the 
wide education of the people, and a moral vigor that had been 
handed down from their forefathers. The honesty, simplicity, 
and pious zeal of the Irish teachers are admitted by the more 
intelligent of their opponents.^) 

But bitter was the hostility with which the Koman Popes 
and the Italian conclaves had long been accustomed to view 
the Island of the Saints, w T here alone their maledictions had 
been treated with neglect ; which had never trembled before 
the violence of a Hildebrand or the milder reproofs of Hono- 
rius ; where they could nover levy the smallest tax nor sell a 
benefice ; where presbyters were married, and suffered their 
hair to hang down upon their shoulders. ( 2 ) As the Popes 
advanced steadily in their career of ambition and crime, and 
the authority of Rome was established by a general extirpa- 
tion of the primitive Christianity of Gaul, Britain, Wales, and 
Scotland, the Church of Ireland became more than ever be- 
fore the object of the envy and hatred of the Italian priests. 
Its simple honesty put to shame the unprincipled lives of 
those guilty men who from the fabled chair of St. Peter had 
set the world an example of falsehood and duplicity that had 

(*) Girald., Topog. Hib. : "Clerus satis religione commendabilis." Ger- 
ald allows them piety, chastity, etc. 

( 2 ) Thierry, Conqu6te, iii., p. 198. New Rome, says Thierry, must rely on 
its arts, not its legions. The inhuman St. Bernard, the Popes, and Gerald 
unite in violent abuse of the Irish Church. 



TEE POPE SELLS IRELAND TO ITS ENEMIES. 419 

corrupted generations, and made Christianity a vain pretense, 
a fearful formalism. Its apostolic usages, its Scriptural doc- 
trines, and its ever -open Bible were arguments so strong 
against the fabric of Komish superstition that the Popes felt 
that they could never be secure until they had swept from 
their path, in fire and blood, the schools, the churches, and the 
native bishops of Ireland. 

To accomplish this inhuman aim, Pope Adrian IV., in 1156, 
sold Ireland to the Normans. For a certain tribute, to be torn 
from its bleeding people, the Holy Father transferred all the 
rights of St. Peter in the soil, the inhabitants, the schools, the 
churches of the Island of the Saints, to Henry II. of England^ 1 ) 
The Italian priest saw all the iniquity of his act. He knew 
that he was letting loose upon a free and prosperous country 
the horrors of an inexpiable war; that the fair fields of Lein- 
ster and Ulster would be swept by bands of ravagers and mur- 
derers ; that the Norman knights, who, in their rage, did not 
spare sex, age, or condition, would harry the land of plenty, 
and bring famine and desolation, waste and ruin, to populous 
cities and pleasant towns ; that women, children, and old men 
would find no mercy from their conquerors, and the stalwart 
youth of Ireland perish in endless seditions. Yet he also 
knew that the vengeance of Kome would be at last accomplish- 
ed, and the rebellious Church of St. Patrick die out in the sor- 
rows of its native land.f) The sale of Ireland to its foes is the 
guiltiest of all the evil deeds of the Italian priesthood. It pro- 
duced a succession of St. Bartholomews ; it was worse than the 
expulsion of the Huguenots ; it has proved more fatal to the 
Irish race than the Holy Office to Spain. From freedom and 
ease they were suddenly reduced to the condition of slaves 
and paupers; from pleasant homes they were driven to live 
in caves, huts, and forests ; they became outcasts and beggars 
amidst rich lands whence their ancestors had won abundance. 
They were herded together by the Normans in narrow dis- 



O Mat. Paris, i., p. 95 ; Girald. Cam., Hib. Ex., ii., 6 ; Thierry, iii., p. 203. 
( 2 ) The Irish in 1081 scarcely knew what was the Church of Eome. See 
Lib. Mun. Nul. Hib., i., p. 50. The bishops and Lanfranc define it to them. 



420 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

tricts, and learned to live like cattle in miserable dens. Once 
the most learned of their contemporaries, the teachers of Eu- 
rope, the Irish sunk at once into unparalleled ignorance. 
Within sight of the great colleges of Cashel and Armagh, they 
forgot the use of books, and knew only the dull drivel of the 
Romish priest. Their bards were silent ; their musicians had 
lost their art ; a broken harp hung against the ruined walls of 
Tara. In fierce, blind ignorance from age to age they have 
risen in vain revolts and striven to be free ; they have shown 
courage without discretion, magnanimity with little knowledge. 
Yet a keen discernment may still discover in the modern Irish- 
man the elements of that character which produced in the age 
of Columba and Columban the purest of saints, the most as- 
siduous of students, before it was betrayed and degraded by 
the cruel Popes of Rome.Q 

So servile and so enfeebled has become the Irish intellect 
under the tyranny of misfortune that not one of its native his- 
torians has dared to trace its sorrows to their source, or to de- 
nounce in honest indignation the selfish crimes of Adrian and 
his successors. ~No patriot of Ireland has ventured to curse 
the hand that betrayed his country.( 2 ) Possessed by a strange 
infatuation, the Irish have become in every land the firmest 
adherents of the Italian priesthood, the authors of all their 
woes ; they have joined in every bold assault of Italian Popes 
upon modern civilization ; they have assailed the public schools 
of America, the new colleges of their native land ; they have 
striven to tear down those institutions of freedom under which, 
in the New World, they might hope to regain their ancient 
ease and vigor ; they have proved everywhere the willing 
slaves of the dying papacy, and have never ventured to rebel 
against that spiritual bondage that was imposed upon them by 
the Normans and the Popes. 

How long this strange delusion will continue can scarcely 

C) Girald. Cam. gives the bull of Adrian (Hib. Ex., ii., 6) without any 
sense of its injustice. There was no doubt of Adrian's authority. 

( 2 ) Moore thinks it " a strange transaction." Lanigan (iv., p. 223) is a 
little more explicit ; but the Irish clergy in general submit to the authority 
of Adrian silently. 



DEBMOT IN ENGLAND. 421 

be told. Yet the descendants of the companions of Patrick 
and Columba, of the victims of Adrian and Dermot, can not 
always remain the dupes of their destroyers ; and it is possi- 
ble that in the careful study of the annals of their country the 
Irish may discover some vigorous impulse that shall lead them 
to value once more freedom, education, and a liberal faith. 

Dermot Macmorrough in his distress had fled to the court 
of Henry II., had received his permission to enlist his subjects 
in the expedition against Ireland, and had engaged Eichard 
Strongbow, of the somewhat decayed family of the Clares, 
Earls of Pembroke, to lead the invading force. Richard was 
to marry Eva, Dermot' s daughter, and to inherit the princi- 
pality of Leinster.Q But the promised bridegroom was slow 
in his preparations, and Dermot glowed with fiery ardor to 
tread once more the fair fields of Leinster, and disturb the 
repose of his enemies. He hired, therefore, Robert Fitz-Ste- 
phen and the family of the Fitzgeralds to join his enterprise, 
and, when they still delayed, set out alone for his native land. 
It was August, 1168, when the traitor took ship at the prom- 
ontory of St. David's; a fair wind blew from the east over 
the tranquil sea, and bore him safely to the hostile coast. Why 
no fierce hurricane sunk his fragile bark, whirlpool dragged 
him down to the caves of the ocean, or raging storm wrecked 
him, where so many innocent have perished, on the lonely 
wilds of Leinster, Irishmen may well wonder ; but Dermot, 
bearing ruin in his path, landed safely at Glass-Carrig, a little 
creek near Wexford, and, hiding in woods and wastes, escaped 
the eyes of his enemies, and was concealed through the winter 
by the clergy and bishop at Ferns. 

In 11 6 8-' 69 various circumstances had conspired to weaken 
the unity of the Irish people : the ravages of the Danes had 
swept away many of the institutions of learning ;( 2 ) the cruel 
necessities of warfare had aroused the baser passions of the 
race; internal strife was frequent; the princes had become 



(*) Hib. Ex., ix., p. 3 : " Stepb.anid.es vero cum snis se ad insultum acriter 
preparautes." 

( 2 ) Gordon, Hist. Ireland ) O'Connor, Hist. Ireland ; Moore, Hist. Ireland. 



422 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

savage and corrupt ; the Danish settlements had accepted Rom- 
ish bishops, and for the first time an archbishop graced with 
the pallium of Home sat in the chair of Patrick at Armagh ; 
the Irish Church was divided by the intrigues of the corrupt 
Italians, although it still refused to pay tribute to Rome or 
conf oral to the Roman ritual ; and a cloud of gloom and dan- 
ger seemed to hover around the island home of the last of the 
Celtic races. 

The traitor, meantime, had not been idle, and in the spring, 
when the green meadows glowed once more with fresh flow- 
ers, and the forests were thick with leaves, Dermot, at the 
head of a few natives, or strangers from Wales, crept serpent- 
like from his hiding-place and began to ravage his native 
land. But the Irish, led by O'Roric, fell upon him with vig- 
or, and he fled back to his refuge in the woods. It was an 
important opportunity lost forever. Had the Irish pursued 
him to his covert, and cut him down with his followers, the 
country might have been saved, and the Normans would 
scarcely have ventured to cross the dangerous seas. But they 
chose to accept his treacherous submission, his gold, and his 
professions, and suffered him to retain a small portion of his 
former territory. Dermot swore fealty to Roderic, King of 
Ireland, and awaited until the approach of his foreign allies 
should enable him to destroy the freedom of his country. 
In May, 1169, Robert Fitz-Stephen, with several Fitzgeralds, 
landed at Banne, a small promontory near "Wexford ; forty 
knights clad in complete armor, and a band of a few hun- 
dred men at arms and archers accompanied them ; a slight in- 
trenchment was thrown up to protect them from the Irish ; 
and the place is still pointed out where the ships of Fitz- 
Stephen were sheltered among the rocks, and the ruin of Ire- 
land began. (*) 

Dermot, with savage joy, came out from his forests once 
more, to greet his foreign allies, to promise them the town of 
Wexford and ample lands as the reward of victory ;( 2 ) and 

(*) Some doubt exists as to the exact place of the lauding. Tradition 
points to Baune. 

( 2 ) Hanmer, p. 223-231. 



IRISH VALOR. 423 

again his hoarse battle-cry resounded in various contests along 
the Wexford shore. Forty Norman knights, in bright and 
impenetrable armor, attended by their men at arms with flash- 
ing swords, and a troop of the famous archers of Wales, drove 
in the Irish forces and besieged the prosperous city. Like 
pillars of steel, with lance and falchion, the Geraldines, skilled 
in all knightly exercises, pierced the thick masses of the na- 
tives ; the Irish had only battle-axes of steel, sharp arrows, and 
short pikes, a small shield of wood and a wadded vest ; the 
shock was too unequal, and the Geraldines conquered in ev- 
ery fray. Wexford was taken or betrayed by its bishop; the 
invaders pressed into Ossory, along the gentle banks of the 
Nore ; the Irish fought with desperate vigor among their bogs 
and forests, but the Normans chased them to the open fields 
and cut them down with fierce delight. Dermot's hoarse war- 
cry was now one of exultation. Two hundred of the enemies' 
heads lay trunkless on the battle-field. The savage hunted 
amidst the strange trophies for the face of his chief foe, and, 
when he had found it, gnawed and mangled it with his teeth.Q 
Scarcely would it be profitable to review these barbarous 
skirmishes of the bearded natives and the steel-clad knights 
in the wild forests of Ossory, did they not form part of that 
remarkable chain of events by which the whole current of hu- 
manity has been stirred, and the Celts driven from their na- 
tive land to swarm over the ocean to the New World and con- 
trol the elections of New York. For the barbarian Dermot 
and his cruel allies were only the leaders in a great crusade, 
which the Popes had planned and Henry Plantagenet had 
been chosen to execute. The blessings of the Church attend- 
ed them ; they were fighting the battles of the papacy ; and 
the giant Dermot, mangling and tearing the features of his 
foe, might have furnished to Spenser a happy allegory by 
which to paint in melodious verse the acrid bigotry of Kome 
tearing the rebellious Church of St. Patrick ; or it may well 
have suggested to Dante the most terrible scene in the " In- 
ferno," where Ugolino banquets on his perpetual revenge. 

O Girald., Hib. Ex. ; Gordon, Hist. Ireland, i., p. 74 et seq. 



4:24: THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

The news of the landing of the Normans and the double 
treachery of Dermot aroused all Ireland. Q The nation sprung 
to arms. An assembly was summoned to the sacred hill of 
Tara, and princes, chiefs, and people met in a solemn council 
on the spot most dear to the memory of Irishmen.Q There 
Patrick had preached to the pagan host. There was the Stone 
of Destiny, on which the Irish kings had been crowned for 
endless generations. There the O'Neils, the MacCarthys, and 
the O'Connors had sworn to preserve the liberties and the 
laws of their country. In the national assemblies at Tara 
from age to age the accomplished bards of Ireland, in every 
moment of danger, had awakened the martial ardor of their 
race by reciting in wild bursts of poetic fancy the patriotic le- 
gends of the Great O'Neil or of Brian Bora, and the sweetest 
melodies of countless harpers had ever ascended from the sa- 
cred hill, rousing to boundless self-devotion the impulsive nat- 
ures of the gifted Celts.( 8 ) Nor, we may well imagine, were 
any of these stirring elements wanting to the last great as- 
sembly of united Irishmen. Koderic O'Connor, King of all 
Ireland, presided. The princes of Connaught and Ulster, Mini- 
ster and Leinster, sat around their national chief ; messengers 
had been dispatched to the farthest limits of the island, call- 
ing its leaders to arms; and one traitor alone was absent, 
whose treachery and crime were known to all his country- 
men. Poets chanted to the enraged and startled people their 
sublimest lyrics, denouncing the traitorous prince, and a thou- 
sand harps clanged, as with rapid touch warriors and princes 
struck their strings and made ready for battle. It was unani- 
mously resolved that the whole force of the nation should be 
gathered, and a perpetual war be waged against the foreigner 

(*) Gerald., Hib. Ex. : "Auditis itaque per insulam novis successibus." 

( 2 ) Leland, Hist., i., p. 36. 

( 3 ) So eminent was the Irish bard that his wife might dress as fine al- 
most as a princess. She was allowed, according to the Brehon laws, orna- 
ments worth three cows ; the princess, six cows. A cow was the standard 
of value in early Ireland. See Vallancey, Collect. Ant. Laws, i., p. 20. A 
poet laureate was allowed five cows for fine clothes. It seems the Irish 
were restricted by sumptuary laws. 



BODERIC O'COXXOR. 425 

and Dermot, the !N"orinans' friend. A vast host poured into 
the fields of Leinster, led by the King of Ireland, and Dermot 
and the Normans, dismayed and disheartened, fled to a wild 
fastness among the marshes of Ferns, where they intrenched 
themselves by felling trees, digging deep trenches, and hiding 
in impenetrable retreats. 

Roderic O'Connor, of the ancient line of Connaught, was 
the last king who sat on the throne of Celtic Ireland. His 
character and exploits are painted with no flattering hand by 
the monkish writers, who longed for his destruction, or later 
historians, who have written in the interest of the Roman 
Church. All the crimes and woes of a fated (Edipus are at- 
tributed to the unhappy king who ventured to strike a last 
blow for the freedom of Ireland, who resisted with obdurate 
patriotism the steel-clad legions of the Pope and Henry II., 
and who more than once seems to have been on the eve of a 
final triumph. It is said that Eoderic was thrown into chains 
by his father, who feared his savage temper ; that he put out 
the eyes of his two brothers ; and that he wasted in civil feuds 
the forces that should have been turned against the foe. He 
seems, indeed, to have wanted prudence, and too often to have 
been deceived by the treacherous arts of Dermot and the 
priests. Yet one can not avoid reviewing with sympathy the 
story of the unhappy monarch whose disastrous reign was at 
least marked by a sincere patriotism, and whose misfortunes 
were never merited by his treachery or his servile fear. 
Amidst his savage wilds and ancestral forests, the O'Connor, 
terrified by novel dangers, assailed by the most powerful mon- 
arch of the age, exposed to the anathemas of the Italian 
Church, surrounded by traitors, and scarcely safe from the in- 
trigues of his own sons or his ambitious rivals, still maintained 
a spirit not unworthy of that long line of patriotic chiefs of 
whom he was destined to be the last ; and it is a graceful trait 
in the character of Roderic that he strove once more to revive, 
by liberal endowments, the famous College of Armagh, as if 
conscious that Ireland could only hope to secure its freedom 
by a general education of its people. 

At the head of his gallant army, Roderic surrounded the 



426 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

Normans in their secret hiding-place, and by his immense su- 
periority might have forced them to surrender. Dermot's 
Irish allies in this moment of danger deserted him. His cause 
seemed lost. His cowardly flight to the forest had checked 
his tide of success ; but his cunning had not failed him, and 
once more he applied himself to negotiation. The cautious 
Roderic was, perhaps, misled by priests or bishops to spare the 
traitor, or may have feared to press the Normans to a desper- 
ate battle. Dermot took a new oath of allegiance to his na- 
tion's king ; gave his favorite son, Connor, as a hostage, who 
was to marry Roderic' s daughter ; and came out from his fast- 
ness to rule over Leinster, and to invite new bands of foreign- 
ers to assail the monarch he had sworn to obey. The Irish 
league was broken by internal dissension, and in the last sad 
hours of their country's freedom the unhappy race was torn 
by civil strife. Q 

Dermot now resolved to drive Eoderic from his throne, and 
become himself the master of Ireland. ( 2 ) He had pledged him- 
self to his countrymen to invite over no more strangers. He 
kept his oath by sending at once for Richard Strongbow. 
" We have watched the storks and swallows," he wrote ; " the 
summer birds are come and gone, yet you delay." Fair Eva 
was soon to see her promised bridegroom, and the earl, allured 
by Dermot's offer of a kingdom, sent over a small force and 
prepared himself to cross the sea. Led by Raymond Fitz- 
gerald, the Normans cut to pieces an army of three thousand 
Irish who had issued from the great city of Waterf ord ; and 
when Earl Richard arrived, in August, with twelve hundred 
men, the city was taken by a desperate assault. The citizens 
lay slaughtered in heaps. Reginald's tower, whose ruin still 
overhangs the modern town, was captured, and its garrison put 
to death ; and amidst the dreadful scene of waste and carnage 
Eva was given to the sanguinary Richard, and the joy of the 



(*) Roderic in vain told the Normans all the crimes of Dermot. Han- 
mer, p. 231. 

( 2 ) Lanigan,Ecc. Hist., whose epithets give no high idea of the taste of 
the University of Pavia, never spares Dermot, iv., p. 191. 



DUBLIN TAKEN. 427 

wedding festival succeeded to the unparalleled horrors of the 
assault. 

A nobler conquest followed. In bold array, with banners fly- 
ing, the whole army marched to the siege of Dublin. Found- 
ed or renewed by the Danes, the metropolis of Ireland was 
already — in the twelfth century — the centre of commerce, in 
wealth and power the rival of London itself. Asgal, the Dane, 
was its civic ruler, or king ; its bishop the famous Lawrence 
O' Toole ; and the latter, whether hopeless of resistance or in- 
clined to the papal interest, formed a treaty and a truce with 
the powerful invaders. Q But the Normans, eager for plun- 
der, unscrupulous and daring, broke into the city before the 
terms were settled, and filled it with bloodshed and terror. 
The needy Geraldines grew rich by a general robbery. Asgal 
and the Danish citizens escaped in their ships to the western 
isles, and the Normans with resistless vigor swept over the 
neighboring districts, and ravaged the fertile fields of Meath. 

In this moment of their country's humiliation the native 
clergy of Ireland, representatives of that ancient Church which 
was soon to be dissipated forever, met in a convocation at 
Armagh to consult upon the causes of their misfortunes. 
With something of the simple honesty and love of justice 
that had marked the followers of Patrick or Columba, the 
pious assembly inquired, through long and careful delibera- 
tions, why divine vengeance had sent the foreigners into their 
country, and which of their sins had chiefly merited the judg- 
ment from above. They determined that their chief national 
crime was the slave-trade. The Irish had long been accus- 
tomed to purchase Saxon slaves from England : was it not a 
retribution from Heaven that their own people were now re- 
duced to the same condition? The enormity of their guilt 
struck the sacred synod, and a generous decree was issued and 
published throughout the land that every English captive 



Q) Girald., Hib. Ex., 16, 17: "Et interveniente prescipue laudabilis me- 
moria, Laurentio." The praises of the Normans must throw doubt on the 
patriotism of the archbishop. Yet he is extravagantly lauded by most 
Irish historians. 



428 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

should be at once set free. It is curious to remember that in 
our recent civil war the Irish, in obedience to their Italian 
masters, were always on the side of the slave-holders; that 
their votes were always given against the Government in its 
greatest distress; and that to defend slavery and the slave- 
trade they had nearly destroyed those free institutions beneath 
whose shelter they had found a tranquil home. They forgot 
the synod of Armagh; they were ignorant of the story of 
their ancestors ; they strove at once, in their blindness, to ruin 
themselves and desolate the land that of all the world alone 
offered them a generous welcome ! 

Unlike his degenerate descendants, Roderic O'Connor made 
a last effort for a free Church and a free State. He denounced, 
in a vigorous proclamation, the traitor Dermot and his papal 
crusade; he began to collect the last army of Ireland; and 
when Dermot insolently claimed, in reply, the sovereignty of 
the whole country, Roderic put to death his son Connor, and 
declared an inexpiable war.Q Meantime dangers again thick- 
ened around the Norman invaders. They held the three 
cities, Dublin, Wexford, and Waterford; but the open country 
was probably hostile, and they must have relied upon England 
for their supplies. At this moment Henry II. grew jealous 
of the designs of Earl Richard, who seemed by his marriage 
with Dermot' s daughter to aspire to an independent crown, 
forbade the English to send him any aid, and ordered him to 
return. For two months the small garrison in Dublin were 
without any assistance from their countrymen. Famine op- 
pressed them ; the people were hostile ; their hopes and their 
resources faded away ; when suddenly a great fleet of Danish 
vessels entered the harbor, and Asgal, with a large force of 
Norwegians from the western isles, surrounded the famished 
city. The red shields and shirts of mail of the strangers, their 
steel battle-axes and sharp spears, were seen before the eastern 
gate. They were men of iron hearts and tried courage ; and 
when the Normans made a desperate sally, with their usual 

C) Girald., Hib. Ex. ; The Four Masters' Aunals, O'Donovan, ed. Dublin, 
1854, ii., p. 1185 et seq. 



THE NOEMANS IN DUBLIN. 429 

vigor, they were beaten back with considerable loss. The city 
must have fallen had not a Norman knight surprised the 
tumultuous enemy by an attack in the rear. A general pan- 
ic seized them ; they fled to their ships, routed and broken ; 
Asgal, King of Dublin, was captured as he fled over the sands 
to the sea, and was beheaded in the city where he had once 
reigned over a prosperous community. 

Cruel, daring, desperate, the small band of Normans, led by 
Earl Richard and the Geraldines, cut off from the aid of their 
countrymen, abandoned by their jealous king, now clung with 
the remorseless energy of robbers to the prey that seemed 
escaping from their grasp. They knew that the Irish were 
rising on all sides around them ; they felt the universal hatred 
of the land they had ravaged and plundered ; yet not one of 
the guilty knights faltered in his aim, or thought for a mo- 
ment of the sorrows of the people he had ruined, or of the 
dangers that hung over himself. Chief of the robber band, 
Earl Richard, founder of the noble house of Clare— tall, rud- 
dy, freckled, his eyes gray, his voice weak, his manner gentle 
and undecided except when the fierce rage of battle stirred 
him — ruled over Dublin. By his side stood Maurice Fitzger- 
ald, the spotless knight, modest, fair, generous, courteous, the 
famous ancestor of the earls of Kildare and Desmond, but 
whose savage courage and unsparing cruelty were known 
chiefly to the helpless Irish; and Raymond, whose yellow 
curls and florid face, pleasant countenance and laughing eyes, 
were joined to a vigilance that never was deceived and a res- 
olution that never wavered. A hundred knights, perhaps, of 
less renown, and four hundred archers and men at arms, made 
up the remainder of the garrison who were assembled in Dub- 
lin at this eventful hour, and who, with ferocious severity, re- 
strained the angry population of the city they had sacked and 
captured, and awaited, in the midst of the hostile kingdom, 
the general onset of its people. 

One friend alone had welcomed the Normans to the shores 
of Ireland, but he was now gone to some undiscovered place 
of rest for the traitor, to the scorn and hatred of posterity. 
A judgment from above, it was believed, had at last fallen 



430 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

upon Dermot; his huge frame was torn and corrupted by a 
disease so terrible as to drive all men from his presence ; his 
agony had been noted with joy by his countrymen ; his mind 
gave way ; he died without any of the solaces of religion ; but 
horrible imprecations escaped his lips as he passed away, and 
his traitorous soul fled, disconsolate, from the land it had 
plunged into ruin.Q 

It is possible that the ingratitude or the contempt of the 
Norman knights may have clouded the last days of the Prince 
of Leinster ; that some patriotic thought may have touched 
his impulsive nature ; that he may have resisted the ISTorman 
projects for exterminating the Irish, and have wavered in his 
friendship to his foreign allies. Earl Richard may have been 
too eager to wear the crown of Leinster, and his fellow-plun- 
derers to appropriate the last hoards of Dermot' s treasure ; 
and the fierce barbarian, stung by their faithlessness, may 
have died cursing the strangers whom he had nourished into 
greatness. But to all Irishmen the example of Dermot should 
be a lesson and a warning. While they survey the long cent- 
uries of unparalleled woes which his treason has entailed upon 
his country, while they heap imprecations on his name, and 
blast his memory with infamy, they must remember that he 
was only the ignorant instrument in fulfilling the long- cher- 
ished designs of the Italian Popes upon the spiritual independ- 
ence of Ireland. 

Once more Eoderic O'Connor descended from his fastness 
of Connaught. Around him were gathered a throng of na- 
tive chiefs and an army of thirty thousand men ; and it seem- 
ed a happy omen for the success of the expedition that the 
Bishop of Dublin, Lawrence O'Toole, had abandoned his Nor- 
man associates, and entered with patriotic ardor into the plans 
of his native king.( 2 ) The bishop's eloquence and pious fame 
stirred the dying hopes of his countrymen ; the Irish presby- 



(') Four Masters, p. 1171, describe his painful death. Gerald merely says 
he died full of years. 

( 2 ) Girald., Hib. Ex. : "Missis quoque Uteris tain Archipraesulis quam 
Rotherici Connactiensis." 



THE IRISH UNITE. 431 

ters preached through all their parishes a holy crusade against 
the papal invaders ; an army and a fleet, led by the king of 
the western isles, joined the national forces, and the whole 
mighty host sat down to besiege Dublin. Earl Kichard had 
thrown himself into the beleaguered city ; Maurice and Ray- 
mond, with unflinching courage, stood at his side. Yet the 
earl, as he surveyed the long lines of the Irish army inclosing 
him on every hand, the masts of the Danish fleet rising over 
the banks of the Liffey, the red shields and flowing locks, the 
stalwart forms and iron armor, of the brave Norwegians, 
might well believe that all was lost. His few bold knights 
and followers were faint from famine and toil. For two 
months no supplies of food or arms had reached them. As 
they rode through the streets of the half-depopulated city they 
might hear the low imprecations of the Irish and the wail of 
the suffering people. Incessant vigils must have taxed their 
strength ; rider and steed grew feeble in the general need ; 
and Earl Richard, doubtful of the result, sent to offer terms 
to the enemy. He proposed to become Roderic's vassal, and 
to hold Leinster as an Irish prince. 

But Roderic replied that unless the Normans abandoned 
Dublin, Waterford, and Wexford, and would consent to leave 
Ireland forever, he would at once assault the city. The Nor- 
mans hesitated. In the midst of their distress a fugitive 
reached the city, a son of the late King Dermot. He bore 
sad news : that Robert Fitz - Stephen was shut up, with his 
wife and children and a few soldiers, in a small fort of turf or 
timber ; that the people of Leinster were rising ; that the life 
of every Norman was in danger. 

Then, remorseless and desperate, the Geraldines resolved to 
conquer or to perish. Young, vigorous, torn by the evil im- 
pulses of avarice and of ambition, the Norman robbers gath- 
ered their scanty force in the centre of Dublin, prepared to 
rush upon the foe. Before them lay the plunder of a peace- 
ful country ; behind them shame and death. " We are hated 
equally by Irish and English," cried Maurice to his compan- 
ions. "We have no refuge but victory. Remember your 
former triumphs ; renew your ancient courage. Let us ride 



432 TEE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

over this miserable rabble, and crush them to the earth.'^ 1 ) 
Raymond, ever hopeful, repeated the sentiments of his cous- 
in ; and every Norman knight, from his raised visor, sternly 
gave his approval. It was determined to attack first the great 
army of Roderic. Not Cortez, when he cut his way to the 
palace of Guatemozin, nor Clive when he broke the ranks of 
Plassey, fought at greater disadvantage than did Richard, Ray- 
mond, and Maurice in the final battle at Dublin. 

Twenty knights, or men at arms, went first, led by Ray- 
mond ;( 2 ) thirty, under Miles de Cogan, followed ; the rear, 
composed of forty more, was commanded by Maurice and 
Earl Richard; six hundred archers, citizens, esquires, com- 
pleted the army of the invaders. Yet wonderful was the re- 
sult of this desperate charge, as, through an open gate, the 
Normans poured like a stream of fire upon the army of King 
Roderic, surprised his guards, and chased his followers, in 
wild panic, to their woods and bogs. The king himself was 
nearly captured while bathing ; negligence and disorder reign- 
ed throughout the Irish lines ; the Norman knights cut down 
the enemy at will upon the fatal plain ; the Norwegians fled ; 
and late in the evening, wearied with slaughter, laden with 
the plunder of the hostile camp, the Norman conquerors 
rode into the streets of Dublin, masters of the destiny of Ire- 
land. 

Three years had scarcely passed since Dermot Macmor- 
rough had planned upon the cliffs of St. David's the ruin of 
his country. The fierce barbarian slept not unavenged ; his 
traitorous hopes had been fulfilled. And now Henry of En- 
gland stood with his fair army of knights and retainers on the 
same wild promontory, and, pausing to pay his devotions in 
that renowned cathedral that still rises the central shrine of 
Wales, besought, with unaccustomed fervor, the blessings of 
Heaven on his projected crimes.( 3 ) Jealous of the successes 

O Girald., Hib. Ex., i., 23 : " Quid igitur expectamus ?" etc. I have re- 
duced the eloquence of Maurice or Gerald. 

( 2 ) "Certatim igitur electa juventus ad arma frosiliens." 

( 3 ) Girald., Hib. Ex., L, 30. Some fragments of the ancient cathedral 
are supposed to be included in the modern. See the fine illustrated edi- 



HENRY II. 433 

of Earl Richard and of the audacious Geraldines, fearful that 
his own subjects might ravish away his expected prize, Henry 
had hastened from his distant domains in Aquitaine, had aban- 
doned the pleasures of London and the charms of a ceaseless 
chase, and with angry countenance surveyed afar off the dim- 
seen shores of Ireland. The barbarian Dermot beheld them 
with a fatal affection ; the savage king, with the destructive 
cravings of a conqueror. His fleet of four hundred ships 
swung safely at anchor on the coast of Wales ; five hundred 
knights — companions, perhaps, of his French campaigns — and 
four thousand men at arms attended him ; his vessels were 
filled with horses, arms, provisions, and all that could insure 
success. In October, 1171, a fair wind bore the papal arma- 
da in triumph to the Irish shore, and the crusade against the 
Irish Church was to be followed out with all the brutality of 
chivalry and all the rigors of spiritual pride. 

Henry Plantagenet was the first of that unhappy line of 
English kings whose follies and whose crimes so often brought 
ruin to the toiling throngs upon whom they trampled. Edu- 
cated in the schools of knightly adventures, trained to cruelty 
and to ambition, the Plantagenets rained war, pestilence, and 
famine upon their unhappy realm. Even the Tudors might 
seem merciful, the Stuarts just, when contrasted with the Ed- 
wards and the Richards who descended from the ill-starred 
union of Henry II. and Eleanor of Aquitaine. But when Hen- 
ry, in the vigor of manhood, ascended the English throne, he 
was learned, acute, generous ; his early misfortunes might have 
softened a selfish nature ; his ambition might have been tem- 
pered by a higher intelligence; yet every circumstance con- 
spired to deprave the youthful king ; and from his wife, his 
friend, and his spiritual head he could have heard only the 
dreadful lessons of cruelty and selfish crime. 

The conqueror of Ireland stands before us painted by one 
who had studied his features and his life with care. He was 
of moderate height, and stout ; his head was large and round, 

tion of Giraldus by Sir E. Hoar, 1806, vol. i., p. 21. There is a view of the 
more recent church. St. David's was the national shrine of Wales. 

28 



434 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

his complexion ruddy, his eyes gray, and often flashing and 
blood-shot with anger ; his countenance fiery ; his voice tremu- 
lous ; his form inclined to grossness, yet strengthened by in- 
cessant exercise. Henry seems never to have known ease or 
rest ; some fierce excitement always stirred him in peace or 
war. In peace, at the first dawn of day, he would mount his 
fleet horse and pass the hours in riding through woods, pen- 
etrating the thick forests, and climbing the ridges of lofty 
hills ; in the evening he returned to a spare supper, but scarce- 
ly sat down until he slept. He loved to watch the falcon 
sweeping on his frighted prey, or to follow the sagacious 
hounds in chase of a weary stag.Q Labor was the chief 
amusement of the active king ; but all his toils tended only to 
the destruction of his own happiness and that of mankind. 
He died cursing the day on which he was born ; and his cease- 
less labors were wasted because he never strove to place him- 
self in unison with the perpetual laws of benevolence and 
truth. 

Clad in royal pomp, surrounded by the knightly paragons 
of his age, Henry landed upon the shores of Ireland — a regal 
falcon fastening upon his prey. The bleeding land writhed, a 
helpless victim, in his grasp. There was now nothing to resist 
his progress. He moved on in triumph from Waterford to 
Dublin. Earl Richard yielded to his authority, and soothed 
his anger by humble compliances; and at Christmas, 1171, 
Henry celebrated his triumph by a festival at Dublin, where 
many of the Irish princes had gathered to offer him their sub- 
mission, and where a great assemblage of the bearded natives 
beheld for the first time the stately feats of chivalry, the unac- 
customed magnificence of a royal court ; tasted the rich viands 
and rare wines of a JSTorman feast, and were dazzled by the 
shining armor, the golden ornaments, the precious gems, and 
the wasteful luxury of their conquerors. A palace of pol- 
ished wood and osiers( 2 ) was erected, after the Irish custom, 

(') Girald. Cam., Hib. Ex., i., 45. Henry was accustomed to put out the 
eyes of his male prisoners and cut off the noses of the female — at least in 
Wales. 

( 2 ) Roger de Hoveden, a.d. 1172. 



IRELAND SUBJECTED TO ROME. 435 

and bishops and princes were forced to approve the ceaseless 
revelry. Yet if any grave and thoughtful chief, unimpressed 
by the pompous show, ventured to ask by what authority Hen- 
ry had taken possession of Ireland, he was told that the Pope, 
as vicar and head of the Church, had given it to the king ; 
and that he who resisted the generous donation of St. Peter to 
his favorite son was a heretic, condemned to everlasting rep- 
robation. 

It was ever the aim of the Roman Church in these savage 
ages — nor does the policy seem yet to have been abandoned — 
to set nation against nation, and from the horrid discord and 
general woe to add to its own revenues and its growing 
strength. Henry, conscious of the claims, the avarice, and the 
malice of his Italian masters, hastened to lay Ireland at their 
feet. A council was summoned at Cashel professing to rep- 
resent the Church of St. Patrick. The Norman king ordered 
the bishops of Ireland to assemble. A motley group of Nor- 
man priests, of martial monks, of the papal archbishops, and a 
few trembling presbyters, natives of the South, gathered at 
his command ; but it was noticed that none of the bishops of 
Ulster or Conn aught assisted at the destruction of their na- 
tional faith ; that they still adhered to the usages of St. John, 
of Patrick, and of Columba ; that the Irish Church, amidst 
bogs and forests, still defied the ambition of cruel Pome. Yet 
the sacrifice was nominally complete. Every trace of inde- 
pendence was abandoned by the Council of Cashel. The Rom- 
ish ritual was enjoined on every priest ; the worship of Mary, 
of images, and of saints was to extend throughout the island ; 
the priest was forbidden to marry ; his hair was to be tonsured 
after the exact fashion at Rome; the enormous crimes and 
vices of the simple clergy who had failed to observe the new 
customs were condemned with indignant solemnity; tithes 
were to be paid by the laity ; and Ireland for the first time 
was made tributary to the Romish Pope.Q 

(*) Girald. Cam., i., 33, 34. Roger de Hoveden pretends that all the bish- 
ops of Ireland were present or obeyed the council ; but Gerald notices only 
a scanty attendance, chiefly Norman. Lanigan, Ecc. Hist., iv., p. 211, says 
Peter-pence are not mentioned. They were perhaps implied. 



436 TEE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

"With a generosity admired by all except the unhappy na- 
tives, Henry next rewarded liberally his Norman followers.^) 
The impoverished knights were enriched by a general plunder. 
The conquered lands were divided among the victors, and the 
territory which had been given by St. Peter to the king was, 
by an infallible title, now vested in the triumphant Normans. 
The Geraldines, unscrupulous offspring of a disreputable par- 
ent, founded noble houses that were long to shine illustrious 
in the revelries of the court or the crimes of the camp. The 
daughter of Richard and Eva, laden with the spoils of her 
country, transmitted the fruits of Dermot's treachery to the 
famous race of Clare. A single knight, De Lacy, received 
eight hundred thousand acres of land in the province of 
Meath; another, Raymond the Poor, whose name indicates 
his condition, became a mighty baron, founder of the house 
of Power. The English territory was slowly extended until 
it embraced the lower portions of Ulster and Connaught, and 
along the frontier was drawn a line of palisades and forts to 
protect the new settlers from the fierce assaults of the hostile 
Irish. 

Within the palisades the country was known as the English 
Pale, and for many centuries formed the stronghold of the 
Norman robbers, from whence they issued in cruel raids upon 
the rebellious districts of the native chiefs. Its Irish popula- 
tion had been wholly extirpated, or were reduced to the con- 
dition of serfs. Many had fled to the mountains and forests, 
and perished in frightful solitudes; some were permitted to 
return to till, as slaves, the lands where their ancestors had 
lived in prosperous ease. The slow process of a national deg- 
radation was begun, and the Irish within the Pale, after many 
bold uprisings, were trodden down nearly to the condition of 
savages or brutes. Their education, their intelligence, passed 
away with their freedom, and the Normans sedulously en- 
forced upon the subject race the fatal bondage of superstitious 
ignorance. 

In the winter of 1171-72 wild storms swept incessantly 

C) Roger de Hoveden, a.d. 1172, notices his liberality or Lis robbery. 



HENRY II. IN IRELAND. 437 

over the Irish seas: scarcely a ship crossed from England. 
Henry and his courtiers trembled before the rage of the ele- 
ments, and men believed that the wrath of Heaven was im- 
pending over the troubled land.Q Fear, doubt, and gloom 
were the king's chief attendants in the moment of his suc- 
cess, and his fiery eyes must often have been turned across 
the stormy waves during that perilous season, eager to catch 
the first sail that might bring him news from England. He 
had left his native realm covered with the odium of the recent 
murder of Becket; he had fled to Ireland as if to dissipate 
his cares in new excitements ; and now he waited with impa- 
tience, shut out by perpetual storms, for some tidings of the 
results of his hasty words, and of the condition of his wide 
dominions. A ship at length came in bearing the most omi- 
nous news. The Pope had threatened to lay his kingdom 
under an interdict; the most fatal of the judgments of the 
Church might soon absolve his subjects from their allegiance. ( 2 ) 
To add to his distress, he was told that his three sons had 
formed a conspiracy against his throne. His fond heart was 
torn by filial ingratitude, and Henry returned from the con- 
quest of Ireland racked by those domestic griefs and those 
eating cares that were at last to bring his proud spirit to igno- 
minious despair. 

A west wind bore the king swiftly back to England ; and 
he once more knelt at St. David's shrine — now no longer with 
feigned grief and assumed contrition — and prepared, with a 
broken heart, to fight for his throne and even his life against 
his children, whom he fondly loved ; his wife, their mother, 
whose evil nature he had so often exasperated and wronged ; 
against the King of France, and the avengers of Becket. 
That Henry should have triumphed in this doubtful contest 
has always been held a proof of singular ability. His inces- 
sant activity enabled him to surprise or confound all his foes. 
He drove back Louis of France to his capital; he met and 



OGirald. Cam., i., 35. 

( 2 ) Girald. Cam., Hib. Ex., i, 36, details the evil news and the sorrows 
of the barbarous king. Boger de Hoveden, a.d. 1172, is more prolix. 



438 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

defeated on the battle-field his three ungrateful sons ; he saw 
Henry and Geoffrey die in the midst of their madness; he 
wept over the early profligacy of the depraved Eichard and 
John. Eleanor of Aquitaine^ 1 ) shut up in a solitary castle, her 
husband's prisoner, had leisure to repent of her crimes against 
two kings. The Pope was pacified by enormous bribes, abject 
concessions, and by the spectacle of bleeding Ireland prostrate 
at St. Peter's feet. 

Meantime the Normans, inclosed in a narrow territory, 
found that the conquest of the island was but just begun. A 
few abject and unworthy bishops might declare at Cashel that 
Henry was the rightful lord of Ireland, but Eoderic O'Connor 
still scoffed at the pretensions of his rival, and the Irish pres- 
byters rejected the authority of the unpatriotic synod. All 
was disorder and unrest within the English Pale. The native 
chiefs seldom left the Normans any repose. At length Hen- 
ry, when his affairs were somewhat settled in England, re- 
solved to test the effect of superstition upon the savage race, 
and to launch the thunders of the Romish popes against the 
Irish patriots. He had procured from Alexander III. a con- 
firmation of the bull of Adrian excommunicating all who op- 
posed his authority over Ireland, and he now prepared to pub- 
lish the two solemn decrees, in their full enormity, to all its 
schismatical Church. IJe fondly hoped that no Irish bishop 
or priest would venture henceforth to resist the authority of 
the Roman See.( 2 ) 

A new synod was assembled at Waterford in 1175, and the 
two bulls were read to the corrupt archbishops, the Norman 
monks, and a feeble delegation from the Irish Church. In 
sonorous tones, John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, who had 
come from Rome bearing the final decree of Alexander, re- 
cited the doom of Ireland. The first bull, that of Adrian IV., 

(*) She was daughter of William, Duke of Aquitaine, the heiress of his 
great possessions, the wife of Louis aud of Henry — the least fortunate of 
women. 

( a ) Lanigan, Ecc. Hist., iv., p. 233, has an implied condemnation of Adri- 
an's bull. He can not admit the coarse charges made by the popes against 
the Irish clergy. 



THE POPE'S BULL. 439 

had been granted to Henry twenty years before, and had been 
safely kept in the royal treasury of England until the moment 
seemed favorable for its publication. Under a florid profes- 
sion of Christian zeal it contained a bitter denunciation of the 
Irish Church.Q It appointed Henry a martial missionary to 
extirpate the seeds of vice from Ireland, and do whatever he 
thought proper with its people ; it declared the island a part 
of the patrimony of St. Peter ;( a ) it commanded the people to 
receive Henry as their sovereign lord and ruler; it insisted, 
with strenuous avarice, that every house in the land should 
pay a penny annually to the blessed Peter, and promised Hen- 
ry the favor of Heaven and an illustrious renown( 3 ) should he 
succeed in planting true religion in the home of Patrick and 
Columba. Alexander's bull was still more effective, if we 
may trust the infallibility of its source, since it not only con- 
firmed the gift of his predecessor, but excommunicated all 
who resisted Henry's authority or that of his heirs, and aban- 
doned them to the power of the devil. Every Irish patriot 
was converted into a child of Satan ; every aspiration of free- 
dom was an impious defiance of the Roman Church.Q 

And now began that perpetual conflict of races, the saddest 
in the annals of Europe, which was to oppress w T ith endless 
misfortunes a gifted and innocent people, and plant in their 
hearts the bitter seeds of ceaseless malignity and revenge. 
From the wild shores of Ulster, where the northern seas break 
fiercely along the rocks and hills of Deny; from the tall 
mountains and endless bogs of Connaught, whose savage land- 
scape has ever been the last retreat of Celtic freemen ; from 
the lovely vales and stately glens of Wickiow, where the bright 
waters of Avoca melt into harmony, and leaping cataracts 
seam the granite precipices, and towering rocks shoot upward 
to the skies ; from soft Killarney, sleeping in its beauty ; or 

C) Girald., Hib. Ex., ii., 6 ; Mat. Paris, i., 95. 

( 2 ) Mat. Paris, i., 95 : " Onmes insulas, quibus sol justitiae Christus illux- 
it, ad jus Sancti Petri et sacrosanctse Romanse ecclesise pertinere." 

( 3 ) Mat. Paris : " Gloriosuui noinen valeas in sseculis obtinere." 

( 4 ) Lanigan, iv., pp. 211, 223, notices various eminent and pure-minded 
Irish prelates of this age not surpassed in any land. 



440 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

grassy Meath, the greenest and the richest of all northern 
pastures — a mournful wail has never ceased to ascend to heav- 
en and blight the charms of the Island of the Saints. Herded 
in filthy hovels, starving in wealthy cities, crouched among the 
wild hills where their ancestors once reigned — a lost, accursed 
race, the Celts breathe endless maledictions on their conquer- 
ors, and, amidst the boundless opulence of nature, live sullen- 
ly in a hopeless decay. 

But when the papal decrees were proclaimed they still re- 
tained a manly sentiment of independence. Princes and peo- 
ple united in defying the authority of the Italian priests. The 
Irish bishops still refused to cut off their flowing locks or put 
away their faithful wives ; the native chiefs derided the for- 
eign pope who claimed their ancestral lands. The Celtic 
kings retreated more and more from the intercourse with pol- 
ished nations. On some wild mountain-side or lonely glen, 
sheltered by trackless forests, sylvan lakes, and lofty hills, the 
Irish monarchs raised their palaces of polished wood roofed 
with wattles, and, surrounded by a courtly train of bearded 
nobles, famous bards, harpers of matchless skill, and brave re- 
tainers, administered the Brehon laws to a faithful race, and 
worshiped with the liturgy of Columba. Shut out from the 
Romish Church, which had excommunicated them, and the 
Normans by whom they were oppressed, the Celts sunk into 
the vices of isolation. They shared in none of the progressive 
movements- of the age. Their literature was a poetic lament 
over a half -imaginary past ; their churches were simple build- 
ings of wood, like those of Patrick or Columba ;Q their relics 
some rude but ponderous bell, whose dull note may have struck 
upon the ears of generations of saints, which was adorned with 
gems and inclosed in a gilded cover; or some pastoral staff 
of an early bishop, glittering with modern decorations. War 
was their chief employment.( 2 ) When no band of Norman 

C) Bede, Hist. Ecc, describes these early churches "non de lapide, sed 
de robore secto totam composuit atque harundine texit." 

( 2 ) Spenser, State of Ireland, p. 7, says : " Yes, truly ; for there be many 
wide countries in Ireland in which the laws of England were never estab- 
lished," etc. This was under Elizabeth. The Brehon laws prevailed. 



THE DEATH OF BODEBIC. 441 

knights threatened their lonely glens, they preyed upon one 
another; the Irish princes covered their native wilderness 
with . slaughter, and the Irish kerns paid the penalty of the 
follies of their chiefs. 

Yet in the opening of the conquest the Celts seemed des- 
tined to a sudden subjection, The Norman chivalry swept 
over the island, and even Eoderic O'Connor was driven to a 
temporary submission. At the head of a few men at arms 
and a band of archers, Raymond dashed over countless hosts 
of natives, and pierced the West of Ireland ; and John de 
Courcy, the Cceur de Lion of the war, broke into the limits 
of Ulster, and, like an enchanted paladin, clove his way, al- 
most by his single arm, to the northern sea. "With one stroke 
of his bright falchion he lopped off heads ; with another, 
limbs.Q His huge and stalwart form, mounted on a milk- 
white steed of unusual size and strength, his fair complexion, 
his fiery valor, and ceaseless activity ; his piety, and the Chris- 
tian zeal with which he knelt regularly at the holy altar, and 
from the spoils of war founded churches and endowed monas- 
teries ; his marriage with the daughter of Godred, the Nor- 
wegian King of Man; his princely state — are celebrated by 
the English chroniclers. But we are also told that the Irish 
began now to resist with vigor, and that even John de Courcy 
and Miles de Cogan fled more than once from the valor of 
Eoderic and the sharp pursuit of the men of Ulster or Con- 
naught. ( 2 ) 

• The ruins of a graceful abbsy, now shorn of roof and win- 
dow, and opening their moss-grown arches to the forest-glade, 
in the lonely wilds of Mayo, are pointed out — for we must 
now dismiss to his repose one of the chief actors in our dra- 
ma—as the refuge for many years of the weary spirit of the 
last of the Irish kings, and the place of his final abode. Rod- 
eric O'Connor sleeps beneath the shattered walls of the mon- 
astery of Coug.Q Hopeless, perhaps disheartened, shocked 

C) Girald., Hib. Ex., ii., 16. ( 2 ) Girald. Cam., Hib. Ex., ii., 16, 17. 

( 3 ) Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall describe the graceful ruins and the lonely- 
tomb. Yet some doubt rests upon the tradition of Eoderic's grave. 



442 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

by the ruin of his country, the cruel ambition of his own chil- 
dren, the cloud of woe that had fallen upon his guilty house, 
the patriotic king had signalized the last years of his reign 
by various bold and successful but seemingly useless exploits 
against the Normans, and then, laying down the crown which 
he had assumed in a happier hour, remained for thirteen years 
a monk or a recluse. We may trust that in the peace of the 
forest glade Eoderic forgot the cares of earth, and entered 
into communion with the spirits of Patrick and Columba. A 
sacred bell, covered with rude but rich decorations, is still 
preserved in the neighborhood, that may have often summon- 
ed him to his devotions or tolled his requiem. The winds 
that sigh amidst the broken arches of Cong seem eloquent of 
his hapless fate ; and if the harp of Tara be hushed and shat- 
tered, and the bards of Erin heard no more, history at least 
must pause to drop a compassionate tear over the moss-grown 
tomb of the patriotic king. 

To compose the troubles of the English Pale, Henry sent 
his son John, a boy of twelve, to rule over Ireland. It would 
scarcely have been possible to have selected a worse exam- 
ple of the results of a chivalric education. John's vices and 
follies were already mature. He was prepared to stab an 
Arthur and to break his father's heart.Q But he was also 
surrounded by a corrupt train of youthful courtiers, painted, 
effeminate, cruel, vain, who shocked the grave and melancholy 
Irish by a strange levity of vice. The miserable prince and 
his fitting associates plundered the land they were sent to 
rule. But a final insult aroused Ireland to revolt. When the 
grave chiefs and wealthy citizens, clothed in their national 
dress, their hair plaited behind in heavy braids, their beards 
flowing upon their breasts, came forward to offer allegiance 
to John, and to give him, as had been their custom with their 
native princes, the kiss of peace, the idle courtiers mocked the 
solemn deputation, and at length seized them contemptuously 
by their beards. The fierce Celtic fire was aroused. The 
chiefs fled to Connaught or Ulster, the people to the forests ; 

C 1 ) Gerald faintly indicates the vices of his pupil. Hib. Ex., ii. 



ROMAN PRIESTS KILL TEE IRISH. 443 

and around the English Pale sprang up a circle of deadly 
foes, and the contest became one of extermination. John re- 
turned to England disgraced and penniless, and the Norman 
knights harried the land he might have soothed into repose. Q 

Centuries of fatal discord followed, during which the Nor- 
mans strove in vain to extirpate the accursed race who refused 
to obey the decrees of the Popes or submit to a foreign lord. 
Papal legates launched new excommunications against the 
Irish, and Romish priests urged on that work of extermina- 
tion which alone could secure the supremacy of the Eomish 
See. The papal monks declared that it was no crime, no sin, 
to kill a Celt. The Norman priests offered free absolution to 
the murderer whose hands were yet stained with the blood of 
an Irishman. The Holy Church opened its most sacred rite 
— which could only be approached with a good conscience and 
a pure heart — to him who had slain one of the abject race. 
The Norman knights thought no more of killing an Irishman 
than a dog : to rob his home, to ravish away his land, to drive 
him, with his family, starving and famished, to the lonely 
wilds, was the favorite sport of the chivalric invaders. The 
mountain lands of Connaught and of Ulster were thronged 
with the population of the plains, who had fled for life from 
the papal robbers ; and every cave and cranny of the glens, 
every inaccessible fastness and hidden glade, was thickly ten- 
anted by men, women, and children, crouching like wild beasts 
from their destroyers. ( 2 ) Nor would even this suffice. The 
priests and knights pursued them to their caves and forests ; 
the miserable tenants were killed in their wild retreats like 
wolves or stags ; and, cursed by popes and persecuted by 
kings, the Church of St. Patrick seemed ready to perish for- 
ever — a victim to the Moloch of Rome. 

One cry of mournful indignation has reached us from the 
fourteenth century — a subdued but touching appeal against 



O Girald., Hib. Ex. ; Soger de Hoveden. 

( 2 ) Letter of Donald to John. J. de Fordun, Scotichron., p. 908, ed. 
Hearne : "Ejectis nobis violenter de spaciosis habitationibus nostris," etc., 
p. 911. 



444 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

the cruel policy of the Italian priests. To John, Pope of 
Home, Donald, King of Ulster, ventured to assert that the 
woes of Ireland were the result of the gift of Adrian to Hen- 
ry,( 2 ) to hint that the Eoman See was the cause of the miseries 
of his race, and to proclaim that war until death against their 
oppressors which should cease only with their destruction. 
Superstition checked the warmth of the Irish ruler ; nor did 
he venture to utter all. the thoughts that must have filled his 
mind when he reviewed the fate of Erin from the days of 
Adrian and Henry to his own. He was overawed by the re- 
nown of that spiritual tyrant to whom he was addressing him- 
self ; he hoped something, perhaps, from the clemency of a 
ruthless pope. Yet he lays bare, with unflinching accuracy, 
the crimes of the Romish clergy. It was the monks, he de- 
clares, that taught that it was no more sin to kill an Irishman 
than a dog.( 2 ) It was the Church that roused the ceaseless 
fires of hate. The Cistercians of Granard or Innis every day 
wounded and killed the Irish, yet said their masses as usual. 
Brother Simon, the Franciscan — unworthy disciple of his 
sweet and gentle founder — preached openly that there was no 
harm in killing or robbing an Irishman. A Clare murdered 
Brian the Eed at his own table after they had shared the con- 
secrated wafer together. The assassin of an Irishman was 
never punished ; and Donald, with mournful truth, declared 
that nothing but the total ruin of his race would satisfy the 
malice of their conquerors. 

The Irish prince closes his appeal with a malediction and 
vow.( 3 ) " We nourish in our hearts," he cries, " an inveterate 
hatred against our oppressors, produced by the memories of 
long years of injustice, by the murders of our fathers and our 
kindred. So long as we have life we will fight against them, 



(*) "Miserabile in quo Romanus pontifex statu nos posuit." — Fordun, 
Scotichron., p. 912. 

( 2 ) "Noii niagis est peccatum interficere hominem Hibernicum quam 
unum canem." — Fordun, p. 918. 

C) "Quanidiii vita aderit, ipsos impugnabimus — mortalem guerram," 
etc. — Fordun, p. 923. 



THE IRISH VICTORIOUS. 4A5 

without pity or remorse ; our children shall continue the end- 
less feud. Never will we lay aside the sword until the Su- 
preme Judge shall have taken vengeance upon their crimes, 
until we have recovered that independence which is our nat- 
ural right, and have avenged those insults which to brave men 
are worse than death." 

Thus the barbarous chief expressed the passions of the 
savage ; but had he aimed his maledictions against the Eoman 
See as well as against its Norman allies, had he vowed for his 
countrymen a deathless hostility against those Italian priests 
and that usurping Church which had instigated all the woes 
of Ireland, had he been able to preserve the pure faith of St. 
Patrick from contamination and decay, he would have pre- 
pared a weapon sharper than a thousand swords for the pres- 
ervation of the freedom of his native land. 

Of the later history of the conquest of Ireland the reader 
may desire a brief detail. The ceaseless warfare, sometimes 
slumbering, yet ever renewed, glowed around the circuit of 
the English Pale ; and when the wars of the Eoses cat down 
the flower of the Norman nobility, the Irish chiefs, in the fa- 
vorable moment, had nearly driven the invaders from their 
land. Ulster, Connaught, and even Munster were free. The 
English were burned within their frontier castles, or nearly 
driven inside the walls of Dublin. The sufferings of centu- 
ries were avenged by horrible atrocities, and the colony of 
English might well tremble before the rage of united Ireland. 
In the fair country below the Shannon, the O'Briens swept 
away the Clares of Thomond, and renewed the Brehon laws 
and the ancient faith in their ancestral lands. The harpers 
gathered in their hospitable courts, and poets chanted by the 
still waters of Killarney. All over Ulster and Connaught it 
is probable that the married priest, unshorn and unpolluted 
by Roman ordination, preached the pure doctrines of Columba, 
and tempered the vengeance of his countrymen. Compara- 
tive peace settled upon Ireland, and its national laws and its 
ancient faith were maintained unchanged except within the 
narrow limits of the English Pale. 

When the Irish were converted to the faith of Rome can 



446 TEE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

scarcely be discovered. Q Until the opening of the sixteenth 
century they can hardly have felt any bond of sympathy to 
the chair of St. Peter, which had covered them with its male- 
dictions and condemned them to slavery. The savage chiefs 
who ruled the wild coasts of Ulster and the wide bogs of Con- 
naught, with their uncultivated and warlike people, knew at 
least that the Bishops of Kome had ever been their bitterest 
enemies, and that the English within the Pale relied upon the 
papal bull as the chief ground of their usurpation. It was 
remembered, no doubt, that the Romish priests had taught 
that an Irishman might be killed like a dog, and that Fran- 
ciscan friars had urged the extirpation of the Irish race. It is 
possible, it is almost certain, that the native chiefs, until the 
opening of modern history, owed no allegiance to Rome, and 
that the Irish Church, endeared to the native Celts by ages of 
persecution, still ministered by its primitive bishops, and, with 
Colman and Columba, traced its authority to Ephesus and St. 
John. But all this was now to change. A reformation had 
passed over Europe, and the chief leaders of the religious 
movement were Henry and Elizabeth, the persecutors of the 
Irish name. The English within the Pale had become Prot- 
estants, but they showed no disposition to abandon the island 
which they had received from St. Peter's patrimony; and in 
the vigorous reign of Elizabeth, the English armies, renewed 
by the fresh impulses of progress, began to press once more 
upon the limits of Celtic independence. The conquest, be- 
gun nearly four centuries before, was now slowly advancing. 
Laws of unusual severity were enacted; tanistry and other 
Irish usages were abolished. It was plainly the design of the 
English queen to reduce the island to a passive subjection to 
her power. 

The cause of this fresh assault upon the liberties of Ireland 

(*) Usher, who was in Ireland as bishop (1640), asserts with confidence 
that the Irish had never been Romanists. See Hanmer, p. 87. Murray, 
Ireland (1845), a defense of Irish freedom, may be consulted, p. 43-60. So, 
too, De VinnC's useful compend (1870), The Irish Primitive Church. The 
Romish writers content themselves with denying well-known facts. See 
Lanigan/etc. 



THE JESUITS IX IRELAND. 447 

were the restless intrigues of the Jesuits. Q In that gallant 
struggle which Elizabeth was destined to wage for the safety 
of her crown and her life against the Pope, the Spaniards, the 
adherents of Mary of Scotland, and all Romish Europe, the 
most active and most dangerous of her foes were ever the dis- 
ciples of Loyola. To ruin and break down every Protestant 
government, to cover with discord and slaughter every Prot- 
estant land, and from the wreck of nations to build up a spirit- 
ual empire as tyrannical and as severe as was that of Tiberius 
or Xero, was then, as now, the secret or open aim of every 
Jesuit. To wound or to destroy Elizabeth the society began 
its disastrous labors in Ireland. The Jesuits, in various dis- 
guises, penetrated to the courts of the native chiefs. They 
roused the fires of national antipathy ; they scoffed at the Sax- 
ons as heretics ; they allured the Irish to abandon forever the 
usages of St. Patrick and to ally themselves with the Italian 
Church ;( 2 ) they promised the natives the protection of St. 
Peter, the shield of Mary, the blessing of the Pope, and the 
military aid of all Catholic Europe, if they would rise once 
more in a grand crusade against the English of the Pale and 
drive the Saxons from their soil. 

The alluring vision painted by the skillful touch of the un- 
sparing Jesuits drew on the Celtic chieftains to their ruin. 
Xot satisfied with the possession of. three-fourths of the isl- 
and, with the enjoyment of their own laws and their own 
faith, with the prospect of a gradual improvement and a peace- 
ful union with their English masters of the Pale, the impul- 
sive people accepted the offers of Pome, threw themselves at 
the Pontiff's feet, and became, for the first time, the willing 
instruments of the Jesuits and the Popes. They may be ex- 
cused, if not forgiven. Their schools had long been swept 
away ; their people had sunk into ignorance ; history, poetry, 

( x ) Sacchinus, iv., p. 148. Wolfe, a Jesuit and a papal nuncio, made his 
way to Cork in 1561. 

( 2 ) So Wolfe probably induced some Irish married priests — for we can 
not believe his scandalous account — to put away their wives. " Clericos 
csenobitasque passim omnes cum mulierculis suis." It is plain that in 
1561 the priests were married. 



448 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

and music had given place to the ceaseless turmoil of a border 
war. Rome stretched forth its cunning hand to extirpate the 
Irish Church, and, after four centuries of violence, succeeded 
at last by a fatal fraud. 

From Ulster and Munster, from the banks of the Shannon 
and the glens of Wicklow, the wild Irish, inspired by the sav- 
age teachings of their Italian masters, fell bravely upon the 
English Pale. But the whole scheme of the crusade proved 
soon the desperate vision of deluded priests. The Pope could 
give little aid to his new converts (1560-1600) ; the Spanish 
were too far off to be of service ; and Elizabeth, resolute and 
bold, sent, one by one, the bravest or the most renowned of 
her courtiers to secure her dominion over the fertile isle. 
Here Raleigh cut down the Irish kerns, and Grey massacred 
the hopeless rebels ; here the Morrises and the Blounts were 
heard of in many a fray ; here Essex, brave but inexperienced, 
wasted his fine army, and returned to perish on the block ; and 
here, at length, the prudent Mountjoy broke the strength of 
the Irish league. Tyrone, the great O'Neil, once master of 
half Ireland, the terror of Elizabeth and of the English Pale, 
went into exile ; the savage chiefs of the West sunk into sub- 
mission ; and when Elizabeth died, Ireland was almost wholly 
conquered. Happy had the fertile isle submitted peacefully 
to its inevitable doom ! 

The later sorrows of this unlucky land may still be traced 
to the mischievous plottings of the society of Loyola.Q The 
Jesuits would never suffer Ireland to repose. A Romish fac- 
tion grew up among its ignorant people pledged to the hope- 
less task of winning back the island to the dominion of the 
Pope. A colony of Scottish Protestants had settled on the 
wasted soil of Ulster, and by industry and intelligence were 
fast restoring the early prosperity of the favored scene of Pat- 
rick's labors and Columba's prayers. The Jesuits and the pa- 
pal chiefs resolved upon their destruction (1640-1644). On a 
sad and memorable day, the source of many a bitter woe to 

(*) Allen, Archer, and many other Jesuits are noted in the various ris- 
ings. See Moore, Hist. Ireland, ii. ; pp. 437, 497. 



MASSACRE OF ULSTER. 449 

Ireland, the Romish forces sprung upon the prosperous colo- 
ny, and wasted it with fierce malignity. Forty thousand Prot- 
estants were massacred without remorse ; the fields of Ulster 
were filled with the dead ; the noble perished in his castle, 
the priest was hanged in his garden, and a new St. Bartholo- 
mew's swept over Ireland.Q But a perpetual terror now set- 
tled upon all Protestant minds ; the Irish massacre shocked 
all Europe ; the Protestant natives brooded over their venge- 
ance ; the spirits of the dead seemed to their impassioned fan- 
cies to float over the terrified isle; spectral illusions filled the 
air. A group of women, whose husbands had been murdered 
and their children drowned at Armagh, saw, about twilight, 
the vision of a woman rising from the waters ; her form was 
erect, her hair hung long and disheveled, her skin was white 
as snow, and she cried incessantly to the sad spectators, " Re- 
venge ! revenge !" A ghost was seen constantly from Decem- 
ber to spring-time, stretching out its spectral hands over the 
scene of death.( 2 ) 

Had Ireland retained the liberal faith of Patrick and Co- 
lumba it might readily have shared in the new impulses of the 
age, and the colleges of Cashel and Armagh and the monas- 
teries of Iona might once again have imparted a consecrated 
civilization to Northern Europe ; once more the hills of An- 
trim might have echoed to the tread of seven thousand stu- 
dents, and the saints and scholars of Erin have restored the 
intellectual glory of the sacred isle. But the fated land was 
now bound by terrible ties to the See of Rome. The Celtic 
race had doomed itself to ceaseless ignorance ; the Popes and 
the Jesuits ruled the hopeless people with remorseless skill; 
and Ireland had allied itself to that cruel and immoral conserv- 
atism which was exemplified in the massacres of Ulster or the 
ravages of Philip of Spain. The name of an Irish Catholic 
seemed now the symbol of barbarous malignity. The Celts, 

(*) The English had often intermingled with the Celts and adopted their 
manners. The contest has from this period been one of religion. 

( 2 ) These spectral illusions, the creations of minds torn by grief or rack- 
ed by apprehension, remind one of the oracles of Thucydides or the appa- 
ritions of Livy. 

29 



450 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

who had once educated Europe, became, under Eomish influ- 
ences, accursed in the eyes of civilization. 

Cromwell, the avenger of the massacre of Derry, in 1649 
entered Ireland to crush the Romish league ; and if retaliation 
or retribution ever soothed a revengeful spirit, the wraiths 
that hovered over the rivers of Ulster must now have sunk to 
rest. The Romish forces melted away before the vigorous 
soldier ; that keen intellect, which had never faltered on the 
battle-field, cut to pieces, by its bold strategy, the Irish host ; 
no pity moved him as he blotted cities from the earth, or 
strewed the land with dead. His cruelty was inexcusable; 
his followers imitated his severity, and Ireland was crushed 
into submission. From Cromwell's time the English ruled 
over the subject island, a severe and exacting caste. The 
bravest and most adventurous of the Celts abandoned their 
native land. They fought in the armies of the Catholic pow- 
ers in every crusade against the reformers. Their valor be- 
came conspicuous on the battle-fields of France and Germany, 
and the papacy had no more remorseless defenders than that 
misguided race who had been sold into slavery by Adrian, 
and reduced to a more fatal bondage by the unscrupulous arts 
of the Jesuits. 

The devotion of the Irish to the Italian prelate grew into 
an insane passion. They gave their lives freely for the priest 
who had destroyed them. The Italians smiled at their sin- 
cerity, and employed them in their bloodiest deeds. A band 
of Irishmen, a Butler and a Devereux, were selected to assas- 
sinate Wallenstein ; an Irishman defended the murder ;Q an 
Irish legion committed fearful crimes in the Yaudois valleys ; 
the brutal cruelty of the O'Neils and the O'Connors shocked 
the moral sense of an unscrupulous age. At length James II. 
set up a Catholic kingdom in Ireland, and the barbarities of 
Tyrone were renewed at the siege of Derry and the pillage of 
Ulster. But the abject race which lay sunk in superstitious 

(*) " Carve, Itinerarium, cap. xi., reliqui Hiberni." Carve, an Irish exile, 
calls Butler, the assassin, an illustrious murderer, and exults over the woes 
of the enemies of Rome. 



THE IRISH EMIGRANTS. 451 

decay was no match for the vigorous Protestants who fought 
under William of Orange. The Irish fell once more into gross 
degradation. Even Swift, the idol of Dublin, scoffed at his 
wretched countrymen ; and for a century the Celts starved 
in their miserable hovels, and groveled before their oppressors. 
The French Revolution and the vain ambition of Napoleon 
roused them to a new insurrection, but the fall of the tyrant 
left them more wretched than before. 

Then began the remarkable emigration of the Celts. A 
free and Protestant land opened wide its hospitable shores to 
the hapless race, and with unbounded generosity offered them 
liberty, equality, and a peaceful home. They swarmed over 
the ocean. A ceaseless tide of Celtic bondmen has poured 
into the cities of the New World. But unhappily the virtues 
of Patrick and the modesty of Columba have too often been 
forgotten by their countrymen. They have brought with 
them an insane devotion to the Romish See — a strange hostili- 
ty to the free institutions of their adopted land. They have 
labored to destroy that wide system of public instruction by 
which alone they can hope to rise from their mental decay. 
They have proclaimed their hostility to the Bible, whose pure 
lessons had once made Ireland the island of the saints. They 
have chosen to linger in vicious ignorance, and to fill the 
prisons and the alms-houses, instead of rising, by education and 
industry, to the dignity of freemen. They have become the 
servile tools of corrupt politicians or foreign priests; and 
when danger hovered over the nation the votes of Irishmen 
were uniformly aimed against the Government, and proved 
often more fatal to the hopes of freedom than the plots of 
Davis or the sword of Lee.( 2 ) 

Yet we may trust that a more honorable career awaits the 
Celts in the future. Gratitude must awaken when knowledge 
has taught them to reflect ; when they compare the generous 
hospitality of the New World with the bitter persecutions of 



( J ) Of course this rebuke will touch ouly the guilty; some of the Irish 
immigrants have been patriots, many industrious and useful ', but yet our 
statement is true. 



452 THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

the Old ; when they reflect that here alone they are free from 
the malice of tyrants and the exactions of the priest ; when 
education shall have aroused them from their blindness, and 
they have discovered, with remorse and shame, that every 
Irishman who, at the command of popes or prelates, labors to 
destroy the free institutions of his adopted home, is a traitor 
worse than Dermot Macmorrough when he guided the papal 
legions to the ruin of his native land. 

On a fair hill, amidst the gentlest scenery of Ulster, stands 
the venerable Cathedral of Armagh, said to have been found- 
ed by St. Patrick, and around it, on the sloping declivities, 
were once gathered the modest buildings where countless 
students, in the period of Ireland's intellectual glory, were 
freely educated and maintained^ 1 ) The hills and vales of the 
beautiful landscape are consecrated in the history of education. 
Here Patrick founded his first free school. Here grew up 
the most renowned of European colleges. Along yonder vales 
the youth of Scotland, Germany, G-aul, and Britain came to 
study the poetry, the music, the history of Ireland, and to list- 
en to illustrious lecturers whose names were famous in Italy 
and Spain. Men of profound learning and undoubted piety 
trod from age to age yonder peaceful plain. The streets of 
Armagh, it is said, were crowded with students. A scholastic 
tumult hung over the quiet scene where now the shuttle and 
the spinning-wheel alone disturb the peace of the rural vil- 
lage ;( a ) a boundless passion for knowledge filled its early 
population ; the clamor of a hundred lecture-rooms resounded 
not far from the tall cliffs of Derry, or where the huge pillars 
of the Giant's Causeway break the waves of the northern sea. 
Patrick, the apostle of the free school and the Scriptural 
Church, still lives in the memories of Armagh. Disciple of 

(*) The Four Masters celebrate a long succession of brilliaut lecturers 
and accomplished rectors of the native colleges. Even in 1170 (ii., 1175) 
the death of the great lector Cormac is related, almost the last of the sages 
of his country. 

( 2 ) Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, Beauties of Ireland, describe with enthusiasm 
the landscape of Armagh, ii., p. 458-460, the charms of the Banu, the grand- 
eur of Lough Neagh. 



TSE UNIVERSITY OF ARMAGH. 453 

St. John, child of the Bible, the humble missionary early dis- 
covered the power of education, and from his free schools or 
colleges sprung up a cultivated nation and a ceaseless throng 
of saints and scholars, poets and priests. 

To aching is it to remember that when, seven centuries later, 
Dermot, Henry, and the Pope were conspiring to let loose 
upon Ireland the horrors of an inexpiable war, to destroy its 
freedom, to crush its Church, and to blot from existence its 
colleges and schools, Eoderic O'Connor gave a munificent and 
a last endowment to the master of the University of Armagh. 
He remembered the heroes and saints who had been educated 
within its walls ; he felt the power of knowledge. Q An an- 
nual donation of ten cows was settled upon the office. The 
generous prince declared that his gift was designed to educate 
freely the youth of Ireland and Scotland, and to advance the 
taste for letters.( 2 ) Soon the tide of war rolled over the isl- 
and; Armagh was sacked and deserted; Irish literature and 
learning ceased to adorn the world ; and the free system of 
education established by St. Patrick was blotted from exist- 
ence by envious Pome. 

To a still holier shrine of Celtic piety and genius we may 
turn as we close our retrospect. Across the waves, near the 
Scottish shore, lie the tombs and ruins of Iona. Two recent 
and accomplished writers have essayed to paint the landscape 
that met the eyes of the Irish saint and the waves that mur- 
mured to his prayers.( 3 ) The warm fancy of the Southern 

(*) Four Masters, ii., 1171. See Trias Thaum., p. 310. " Rodericus rex 
summopere cupiens in academic Ardmochansi studia promovere — e& con- 
ditione et studinm generale pro scholaribus, tarn ex Hibernia unde quo- 
que, quara ex Albania adventantibus." The Four Masters say that Eoderic 
gave it in honor of St. Patrick, and to instruct youth in literature. 

( 2 ) Ten cows yearly was a munificent endowment. The Brehon law al- 
lows six cows as the price of a queen's wardrobe. Vallancey, Col. i., App. 
By the example of a modern court the income of the rector may be esti- 
mated at a very high rate. Compared to his modern successors, he was 
wealthy ; for what professor would not be content with an income nearly 
twice the value of a queen's wardrobe ? 

( 3 ) Montalembert, Monks of the West, and the Duke of Argyll's IoDa, 
paint its different aspects. 



454: THE CONQUEST OF IRELAND. 

Celt sees only the cold and misty sky, the barren rocks, the 
pale sun of the North, the wild and stormy ocean ; the High- 
land chief adorns the scene with richer colors. Eed cliffs rise 
out of an emerald sea; the heavy banks of clouds far out 
on the western main are lighted with dazzling sunshine ; the 
blue outline of the Scottish coast, a throng of islets, bare or 
verdant, and the endless waste of the dim Atlantic — an un- 
rivaled wealth of sea, cloud, and sky — surround the home of 
Columba. But, more majestic than nature's grandest aspect, 
ever hovers over his beloved isle the form of the holy teacher 
proclaiming its immortal renown, and the rulers and the peo- 
ple of many lands have fulfilled his prophecy, and nations 
have worshiped at his shrine.Q 

It is possible that from Iona and Armagh, from Patrick 
and Columba, from the free school and the free Church, may 
come the restoration of the Celtic race ; that a fallen but vig- 
orous people, long corrupted and degraded by superstitious 
ignorance, may submit to a nobler conquest of reason and 
humanity ; and that Irishmen, in every land, may once more 
learn from their ancient teachers modesty, docility, gentleness 
— the foundations of mental strength. 

O Columba prophesied that every "barbarous and foreign nation would 
celebrate the renown of his narrow and barren isle. 



THE GREEK CHURCH. 

The annals of man offer few more varied, more magnifi- 
cent, or more touching records than those of the Eastern 
Church ;Q and from its dim yet hallowed origin, through its 
loug career of worldly triumph and of spiritual joy, of bitter 
overthrows and of swift decline, of fresh revivals and unpre- 
cedented strength, until to-day it rules over half Europe, and 
threatens the subjugation of Asia from the Indus to the China 
seas, a surpassing interest has ever followed the only Christian 
body that can claim a visible descent from the companions of 
its founder. A cloud of doubt, of fable, or conjecture, rests 
upon the pretensions of the Church of Rome ; the legend of 
St. Peter relies upon no contemporary proof, and belongs to 
the domain of faith rather than of history ; nor does any Prot- 
estant communion profess to trace its origin through an un- 
broken line of presbyters and bishops to the apostolic age. 
But the Oriental Church seems possessed of a well-authenti- 
cated genealogy. Its language is still that in which the Gos- 
pels were written and Polycarp and Ignatius preached; its 
melodious ritualQ reaches back to the days of Constantine 
and Athanasius ; its great patriarchates, that sprung up in the 
veritable homes of the apostles, are yet faintly delineated in 
the feeble churches of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constanti- 
nople ; along the fair shores of Syria and Asia Minor the shat- 
tered ruins of the Christian Church have outlived the fallen 
shrines of Antioch or Ephesus ; and from the city of Con- 
stantine, the capital of the Christian world, has flowed a regu- 

( 2 ) Mouravieff, Hist. Russ. Church, trans. Stanley, Eastern Church, has 
made free and effective use of the Russian historian, besides his own care- 
ful researches. 

( 2 ) King, Rites, etc., of the Greek Church ; Renaudot, Liturg. Orient., 
1847, Paris, p. 30 ; Neale, Patriarchates. 



456 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

lar apostolic succession, whose members still minister to de- 
vout congregations from the Kremlin to Solovetsky. 

Scholar as well as theologian will find much in the annals 
of the Greek Church to touch his sympathy and startle his 
curiosity. The genius of Attic civilization seems often re- 
vived in its teachings ; the humane and liberal spirit of phi- 
losophers and poets, the gentler impulses of Plato or Socrates, 
are renewed, together with their names, through all those bar- 
barous races that were educated from the brilliant schools of 
Constantinople. While the Latin Church, under its illiterate 
popes, inculcated persecution, and grew into a fierce and ag- 
gressive political despotism, the Greeks, looking ever to the 
teachings of Nice and of Constantine, have preserved a hu- 
mane toleration^ 1 ) As if in tender recollection of their high 
intellectual ancestry, the monks of Mount Athos and the 
priests of the Kremlin have painted on the walls of their ca- 
thedrals the venerable faces of Homer, Pythagoras, or Plato, 
and admit to the catalogue of the just the sages and heroes 
who prepared the path of Christianity. In Moscow or Nov- 
gorod, the Mohammedan, the Lutheran, and the Eoman Cath- 
olic are permitted to enjoy their faith and their religious rites 
undisturbed. No St. Bartholomew's, no dragonnades, no ra- 
ging Inquisition, no hecatombs of martyrs, no strange and 
cunning tortures, such as those devised by the keen invention 
of Jesuits and Romish priests, have ever defiled the venerable 
ministry that traces its origin to Ephesus and St. John. 

Along that hot but luxuriant shore, reaching from the falls 
of the Nile to the lower borders of the Euxine, still fertile at 
that momentous period in the richest productions of nature 
and art, the land of Homer and Herodotus, Scopas and Par- 
rhasius, of stately architecture and perpetual song, the East- 
ern Church, at the opening of the Council of Nice and the 
triumph of Constantine, had fixed its immutable foundations. 
Its mighty bishoprics — seats of learning as well as of abundant 

(*) Stanley, Eastern Church, pp. 34, 35. King, p. 6-8, notices that the 
Greeks have never worshiped the Virgin or the saints. But Covel, Greek 
Church, p. 376, thinks the Greeks "the most zealous adorers of the mother 
of God." 



THE SEVEN CHURCHES. 457 

faith — seemed the corner-stones of Christianity. Alexandria, 
Antioch, and the Seven Churches were flourishing with such 
outward vigor as to overshadow the feeble Church of Borne 
and the missionary stations of the barbarous West. Rome, in 
fact, had long remained a Greek congregation, Its bishops 
employed the Greek language in their writings or exhorta- 
tions ;(*) its presbyter, Anicetus, admitted the superior author- 
ity of Polycarp ; its members were obscure, uncultivated, and 
humbled by frequent persecutions. But, in the great cities of 
the East, Christianity already had invested itself with material 
and intellectual splendor. At the famous schools of Alexan- 
dria the keen faculties of the heretic, Arius, and the resolute 
genius of his young opponent, Athanasius, had been prepared 
for that vigorous contest that was to divide Christendom. 
In all the Syrian cities Christianity became the religion of the 
intellectual classes. Learning and philosophy were blended 
with faith ; the Eastern bishops were voluminous writers, po- 
ets, orators, even novelists ; while all along the sacred shore 
stately churches grew up above the ruins of the pagan tem- 
ples, the Nile was lined with monasteries and cathedrals, the 
cliffs of the Grecian coast were converted into pious strong- 
holds, the abode of cultivated eremites ;( 2 ) the soft music and 
the gay processions of the classic creed were borrowed to en- 
large and corrupt the Christian ritual ; and the Greek Church 
had already assumed something of its modern form. 

At length (325), with cries of victory and peace, the Coun- 
cil of Nice assembled. Martyrs and confessors, maimed bish- 
ops and eyeless hermits, cultivated scholars from the learned 
seminaries of Egypt and Alexandria, monks from the The- 
baid, and anchorites from the desert, gathered at the call of 
Constantine to decide the doctrines and the usages of the tri- 

( x ) The epistles of Clement are in Greek. Paul wrote in Greek to the 
Romans. 

( 2 ) The Egyptian ascetics appear about the middle of the third century. 
The practice was rapidly adopted. Of the monasteries of Mount Athos 
some boast an origin at least contemporary with Constantine. See Cur- 
zon, Levant, p. 340. The Vatopede is said to have had Constantiue for its 
founder. 



458 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

umphant Church. Amidst its eager and clamorous throng 
wandered the inspired dwarf Athanasius, deformed, with glit- 
tering eyes ; or the tall, emaciated Arius, wasted with penance 
and conscious of defeat, summoning his followers to that in- 
tellectual combat whose decision was to fix the opinions of 
half mankind. Yet the decrees of the first, perhaps the only, 
general council deserving of a lasting veneration are observed 
alone by the obedient Greeks. Imperious Rome has long 
neglected its injunctions and interpolated its creed. Protest- 
antism has preferred to revive the simpler usages of the apos- 
tolic age. But the Eastern Church has remained immutable. 
Its clergy are married ; its creed is still that of Constantine 
and of Nice ; the worship of Mary has never been allowed 
to overshadow the purer rites of a cultivated age ; the priest 
has never aspired to a temporal supremacy; the Scriptures 
are still read in the national language in its churches ; the au- 
thority of the sultan or the czar is admitted in the selection 
of its patriarchs and bishops. The mild genius of Constan- 
tine founded an ecclesiastical system that for fifteen centuries 
has obeyed his precepts and reverenced his fame. 

To Constantine the Eastern Church was to owe its central 
shrine. The Christian capital arose on the verge of Europe 
and of Asia, over whose mental and religious progress it was 
never to lose its influence, in the fairest site known to the 
ancient world. The waters of the Euxine rushed before the 
city of Constantine, through a long and sometimes narrow 
strait, to mingle with the iEgean. By its side the Golden 
Horn offered a safe and almost tideless harbor ; ships from 
Arabia and from Scythia might meet in the friendly shelter. 
Around it opened a landscape rich with the later results of 
Greek cultivation ; and the delusive beauties of the modern 
city can only faintly reflect the magnificence of the scene when 
the shores of the thickly wooded Propontis were cultivated 
with Attic elegance^ 1 ) and the marble churches and palaces of 
Constantine covered the swelling promontory from the harbor 

(*) Gibbon often describes the attractions of Constantinople. Von Ham- 
mer, Constantinople, etc., may be consulted. 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 459 

to the glittering sea. Nothing was wanting, except perhaps 
creative genius, to make the new Rome the chief of cities. 
The wealth of an empire was lavished in its decoration. 
Within ten years it attained a splendor that might rival the 
fruits of ten centuries of the slow progress of ancient Pome. 
The new Romulus traced the circuit and witnessed the com- 
pletion of his capital. Its temples were brighter than the yel- 
low columns of the Parthenon ; its circus more spacious than 
that of Tarquin : its baths, aqueducts, and fountains, its abun- 
dant markets and its stately churches, provided for the re- 
quirements of a population that sprung up with artificial vig- 
or ; and for more than a thousand years, amidst the barbarous 
turmoil of mediaeval Europe, Constantinople outshone all its 
rivals, even in its slow decay. 

It was a museum and a store-house for the ravished treas- 
ures of Greece. A tripod of serpents from Delphi, statues 
from the deserted temples of the ancient faith, columns carved 
in the days of Phidias, gems and precious stones from the cor- 
onals of ancient deities, libraries gathered in the home of phi- 
losophy, the writings of the fathers, the poets, and the sages, 
found shelter in the halls of Constantine. when the museum 
of Alexandria was made desolate, and the Acropolis had be- 
come the haunt of robbers. Protected by its fortunate situ- 
ation and its lofty walls. Constantinople held securely within 
its bosom its precious deposit. A last bulwark of civilization 
when all the world was savage, its schools still employed the 
language of Homer ; its students read Euripides or dreamed 
of Plato ; the wisdom which had been lost to all other men 
was still familiar to its children ; the priests of the Greek 
Church were all cultivated, and often gifted with rare ability ; 
and while the Latin clergy could seldom read or write, a liv- 
ing fountain of true learning fertilized the intellect of the 
East. 

With the death of its founder a remarkable revolution 
passed over the Christian capital, and under the rule of the 
corrupt Constantius the opinions of the heretic Alius were 
enforced upon its clergy and its people ; the whole Christian 
world seemed converted by the subtle argument of the new 



460 THE GREEK CHUBCH. 

sect.Q The great see of Alexandria, almost imperial in pow- 
er and state, was governed by an Arian bishop ; Antioch and 
Jerusalem yielded to the arts of the emperor ; Rome and dis- 
tant Spain obeyed his commands ;( 2 ) but Athanasius, and per- 
haps the majority of the laity, still defended the Trinitarian- 
ism of Nice, and the latent principle of Christianity was kept 
in remembrance by the sharp diatribes of the exiled prelate. 
Bitter, vindictive, magnanimous, unconquerable, a weary life 
awaited the presbyter who had defeated Arius in his early 
vigor, but who seemed at last to have sunk in his old age into 
a forlorn and powerless victim before the avenging spirit of 
his fallen foe. The cruelty and the keen persecutions of the 
Arians drove Athanasius to a savage retreat in the wilderness, 
and oppressed his adherents with bitter tortures. Yet more 
than once the heroic Copt, his diminutive frame inspired by a 
genuine courage, came out from his hiding-place to terrify the 
court and the hostile clergy into an insincere compromise; 
often the faithful Egyptians concealed, at the peril of lif e and 
fortune, the great head of their Church. Of all the spectacles 
witnessed at Alexandria, the most memorable was the recep- 
tion of Athanasius after his first exile and return. The whole 
Egyptian population poured out like a swelling Nile — it is 
the figure of the narrator — to greet with shouts of joy and 
adoration the national saint. On the one side a huge mass of 
dusky children lined the broad highway ; the men and wom- 
en, separated into two vast hosts, as was the Oriental custom, 
rolled out of the city gates, an endless stream ; every trade 
and profession was ranged in order ; branches of trees were 
waved aloft; the richest carpets of the Alexandrian looms 
were flung, radiant with gay colors and costly figures, in the 
pathway of the hero ; and when his feeble form rose on the 
sight, one wild burst of acclamation broke from myriads of 
lips. Countless hands were clapped with rapturous joy, and 

( J ) Mosheim, i., p. 345 ; Gieseler, i., p. 302 ; Gibbon, iii., p. 11. Constan- 
tinople was the principal seat and fortress of Arianism. 

( 2 ) See Hefele, Con., i., p. 658; Milman, Hist. Christ., ii., p. 431. The 
forced apostasy of Hosius and Liberius is well known. I need not allude 
to the yain controversy. 



THE DOME OF ST. SOPHIA. 461 

the most precious ointments, cast before him, filled the air 
with fragrance. At night the whole city glowed with a gen- 
eral illumination, and in every house rich entertainments in- 
vited perpetual guests. An unusual religious fervor followed. 
Men, women, children, hid themselves in convents, or sought 
a hermitage in the desert ; the hungry were fed, the orphans 
sheltered, and every household, filled with devotion, seemed 
transformed into a Christian church. 

Through a weary life of ceaseless persecution AthanasiusQ 
passed onward to old age and death. But his victory was at 
last secured. Constantinople, Rome, and Alexandria returned 
to the Trinitarian faith, and the great Theodosius reigned in 
the Christian capital over an undivided church. The fair 
and prosperous city of Constantine became now the admit- 
ted head of Christendom. Rome, sacked and depopulated by 
Goth and Yandal, almost ceased to dispute the supremacy of 
the Eastern bishops ; the Patriarch of Constantinople claimed 
a universal rule; the Popes feebly or violently protested 
against the assumption ; the Eastern emperors selected or de- 
posed at will the Latin bishops; Justinian and Belisarius 
scoffed at the fallen priests of the ancient capital. 

From Justinian the Eastern Church was to borrow that 
novel and pleasing style of architecture which was to adorn 
the Kremlin and satisfy the fancy of Moslem or Christian, 
whose glittering domes and lavish decorations of gems and 
gold are more grateful to the Oriental taste than the wildest 
or the grandest of the Gothic minsters ; and in his long and 
wasteful reign churches and monasteries were scattered with 
profuse hand over his tottering empire. It is the character- 
istic of feeble rulers to seek for renown in huge or costly 
buildings. The active but imbecile Justinian toiled to com- 
plete the splendor of Constantinople, and to make it worthy 
of himself. Nor was he unsuccessful. The magnificence of 

(*) Such was the pre-eminence of Alexandria in mathematics that to its 
bishops only was given the duty of fixing the beginning of Lent and the 
Easter season. The bishop issued every year a festal letter. Those of 
Athanasius have recently been discovered. See Cureton, Festal Let. of 
Athanasius. 



462 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

the decaying capital was perfected by the last resources of an 
impoverished world. A throng of stately churches, a palace 
of unequaled splendor, groves, gardens, and public edifices, 
rich with varied marbles, mosaics, and gold, covered anew the 
fortunate site where Constantine had first transplanted the 
simpler forms of Grecian architecture, and preserved the 
memory of the Doric temple or the Corinthian shaft. But 
under Justinian arose that tall and graceful dome of St. So- 
phia, the most wonderful of the inventions of the later ar- 
chitects, whose fair proportions still rise over the Moslem city, 
and reproach the Eastern Church with the spectacle of its 
desecrated shrine.Q St. Sophia was built of brick, but coated 
with marble ; its exterior, like the churches of the Kremlin, 
could never have been imposing ; but no sooner had the spec- 
tator passed its gates of bronze than he was dazzled by a pro- 
fusion of rare embellishments such as St. Peter's can scarcely 
surpass. Above him soared the central cupola, surrounded by 
six smaller domes, covered with heavy gilding and gleaming 
with varied colors. A hundred columns of jasper, porphyry, 
or costly marble, torn from ancient temples, and dissimilar in 
form and carving, sustained the lofty roof. The altar was a 
pile of silver. The sacred utensils were of purest gold, stud- 
ded with inestimable gems. From the walls looked down the 
figures of saints and angels; and in the form of a Greek 
cross the magnificence of St. Sophia opened at once upon the 
observer, and presented all its gilding, its mosaics, and its 
bronzes, its gold and gems, at a single glance. In its modern 
dress only the bare and dusky walls and the graceful domes 
remain ; the priceless ornaments of the shrine and chancel are 
gone ; yet the columns of porphyry from the Temple of the 
Sun, and the green marbles of Ephesus, may yet be distin- 
guished, and the dull echoes of Mohammedan eloquence seem 
profane and dissonant in the desecrated shrine where once the 
Christian world collected its treasures and poured forth its 
prayers. 

(*) Gibbon's account of St. Sophia, iii., p. 523, has been enlarged by mod- 
ern investigations. See Von Hammer, Constantinople und der Bosporus, 
i., p. 346 ; Byzantine Arch., Texier and Pullan, p. 21-59. 



ST. SOPHIA. 463 

To perfect his grand conception of a Christian cathedral, 
Justinian labored with an ardor that never tired. Often he 
was seen under the glare of the noonday sun, while all others 
slept, clad in a coarse linen tunic, a staff in his hand, his head 
bound with a linen cloth, directing his workmen, urging on 
the indolent, and stimulating the industrious. Tradition re- 
lates that angelic visions guided him in his labors and suggest- 
ed his happiest ideas.Q A spiritual guest revealed to him a 
hidden treasure ; a figure robed in white descended on the sa- 
cred site, and was deluded by the acute emperor into a prom- 
ise to remain forever. But the ceaseless industry of ten thou- 
sand laborers, toiling often by night and day, in the course of 
six years completed the Church of the Holy "Wisdom. Four 
columns, tall, graceful, and firm, sustained the swelling dome. 
Its tiles of Rhodian clay were the lightest of building materi- 
als. Its height from the pavement was one hundred and sev- 
enty-nine feet, its breadth one hundred. Twenty -four low 
and rounded windows threw streams of light through its 
groined ribs of equal number. Four colossal figures of winged 
seraphim adorned its four angles ; and from its summit looked 
down the majestic face of Christ, the Sovereign Judge, whose 
noble aspect is still imitated or reproduced in every Byzantine 
cathedral. At the eastern end of the pillared nave, the climax 
of the magnificent interior, arose the silver screen of the altar, 
composed of twelve pillars wrought with arabesque devices, 
twined into pairs, and graced with holy faces. A massive 
cross of gold appeared above. The table of the altar was 
formed of molten gold, into which the most costly gems had 
been cast in uncounted masses. Behind the altar, seats of sil- 
ver, separated by golden pillars, were arranged for the bishop 
and clergy. Tall candelabra of gold, of the richest workman- 
ship, threw a soft light over the glittering scene. A pulpit, a 
throne for the emperor and one for the patriarch, and seats 
for innumerable priests, probably filled all the space of the 

( l ) Paul the Silentiary, and Anonynii, in Banduri, p. 61. The late sultan 
permitted St. Sophia to be studied, the walls purified, the figures copied, 
"but re-covered. See Fossati, drawings lithographed by Hague: London, 
1854. For the first time thev were seen since 1453. 



464: THE GREEK CHURCH. 

eastern end. The altar cloths were stiff with gold and gems, 
and patriarch and emperor were adorned with robes encum- 
bered with the spoils of ages. 

Such was the monument of barbaric folly which Justinian 
transmitted to the Eastern Church. Feeble vanity, religious 
ardor, artistic genius, and inhuman waste are all exemplified 
in the story of the Greek cathedral. The world groaned with 
taxation and misery that the corrupt Church might possess a 
gorgeous shrine ; yet the great edifice has proved more lasting 
than any of its contemporaries, and promises to be almost as 
enduring as that grotesque, half -barbarous, and half -imbecile 
scheme of law which Justinian embodied in the Pandects 
and the Novels.Q Often shattered by earthquakes or defaced 
by insurrections, plundered by conquerors and stripped by the 
Turk, St. Sophia has outlived the cathedrals of Charlemagne 
and the early basilicas of Rome. It preceded by nearly a 
thousand years the foundation of St. Peter's. It opened a new 
era in architecture. Its graceful dome has been imitated at 
Moscow and Novgorod, in Florence and Rome. The bound- 
less richness of its interior decorations has been nearly rivaled 
in the Kremlin or the churches of St. Petersburg. ( 2 ) Yet no 
modern cathedral can recall such splendid and such touching 
memories as those that cluster around the central shrine of the 
Eastern Church. On Christmas-day, in the year 538, its found- 
er dedicated his stately labors with a pompous pageant that 
exhausted the wealth and the invention of his empire. The 
great bronze doors rolled open. The emperor, clothed in pur- 
ple ; the patriarch, radiant with cloth of gold ; a host of inferi- 
or clergy, arrayed in the rich vesture of a corrupt ritual, filled 
the silver seats around the altar. The golden candlesticks 
poured down their light. The courtiers and the people cov- 
ered the wide expanse of the nave or dome. The graceful 
galleries were thronged with the fairest and the noblest 
women of Constantinople ; and Justinian, in grateful exulta- 

(*) I would scarcely wish to do injustice to Justinian's codifiers ; but Ga- 
ius is better than his imitator, and the Twelve Tables better than Gaius. 

( 2 ) The Church of St. Isaac, at St. Petersburg, is said to surpass all that 
man can conceive of splendor. Dicey. 



THE ORIENTAL SHRINE. 465 

tion, with arms outstretched and lifted in the attitude of 
prayer, exclaimed, " Glory to God, who has deemed me wor- 
thy of such a work ! I have conquered thee, O Solomon !" 
The chant of countless choristers swelled through the pil- 
lared aisles. Immense sums were expended in lavish gifts to 
the poor, and the whole city shared in the boundless yet too 
transient satisfaction of its master. 

For nine centuries, in St. Sophia emperors were enthroned, 
patriarchs installed, and the Christian festivals celebrated with 
Oriental pomp. It was the favorite scene for the display of 
the feeble magnificence of the Byzantine court. The impe- 
rial marriages and baptisms were celebrated at its altar ; and 
above the holy spot, in the vain pride of Greek exclusiveness, 
was inscribed the law forbidding the marriage of a Byzantine 
prince with a stranger. Often its interior witnessed wild 
outrages and riotous fanaticism; its pavements were stain- 
ed with blood in the fierce struggle of the image - breakers. 
From its pulpit Photius pronounced the excommunication of 
Borne and the separation of the two churches. The sweet 
music of its choristers and the splendor of its rites converted 
the Russians to the faith of Constantine. It was desecrated 
with barbarous sacrileges by the Latin Crusaders ; a papal 
priest sat for a moment in the chair of Photius ; and the ha- 
tred of the Greeks for the Latins sprung up with new inten- 
sity as they saw the brutal deeds of the chivalry of the West. 
" Bather," they cried, " would we see the turban of Moham- 
med than the pope's tiara in Constantinople." At length, in 
the opening of the tenth century of its existence, the vast ca- 
thedral beheld the most dreadful of all its woes. Amidst the 
groans and cries of the host of dying Greeks, Mohammed II. 
strode up its blood-stained nave, and proclaimed from its high 
altar the God and Prophet of an accursed faith.Q A gold- 
en crescent was raised above the dome of St. Sophia. The 
Greek Church, fallen and powerless, yet wept over the dese- 

(') "Die Manner wurden mit Stricken, die Weiber mit ihren Giirteln 
zwey und zwey zusammengebanden." Von Hammer, L, p. 550. The des- 
olation of St. Sophia was completed by the plunder of its ornaments and 
the covering-up of its pictures. 

30 



4:66 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

cration of its central shrine as the chief of its humiliations ; 
nor in all its wide domain is there to-day a priest or layman 
who does not remember that St. Sophia was torn from his 
ancestors by the savage Turk, or long for the day of its res- 
toration. 

Not from Goth or Hun, from the fierce tribes of the Ger- 
man forests who had stricken down the mighty fabric of the 
Latin rule, was to come the final desolation of the Eastern 
Church. In the opening of the seventh century it still re- 
tained an exterior grandeur that overawed the feebler sees of 
Western Christendom. The authority of Constantinople, in 
Church and State, was admitted at Antioch and Alexandria, 
in Africa and Italy. Home, already ambitious and avaricious, 
was a humble dependency of the Eastern empire. The arms 
of Parses and Belisarius had alone saved the fallen capital 
from the rule of an Arian chief, and perhaps an Arian 
pope.Q Nor was it without a reasonable sense of superior 
intelligence as well as power that the bishops of Constantino- 
ple had assumed the title of Universal Patriarch, and claimed 
a general control of the Christian Church. Gothic Spain was 
yet held by the Arians; the great Lombard kingdom of 
Northern Italy still threatened to enforce the doctrines of 
Arius upon the Catholics of Rome and Naples ; at Alexandria 
the native Copts clung to the Monophysite heresy, and sub- 
mitted reluctantly to the supremacy of the Greeks ; yet the 
Patriarch of Constantinople was still the chief head of Catho- 
lic orthodoxy, and from the pulpit of St. Sophia instructed 
an obedient world. 

It was the sword of the Saracen that swept into sudden ruin 
the venerable seats of early Christianity. The children of 
the Arabian deserts are divided into two hostile and dissimi- 
lar families — the dwellers in cities and the dwellers in the 
sands. ( 2 ) The former, assuming the pacific habits of the mer- 
chant, had laid aside the savage virtues and vices of the Bed- 

( 1 ) How nearly Eorae became Arian forever, when its infallible popes 
must have propagated fatal heresy, may be seen in the history of the 
time. It was long a question whether Arianism would not rule the West. 

( 2 ) Amari, La Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, i., p. 34. 



THE ARABS AND THE GREEK CHURCH. 467 

ouin. They lived in the rich fields of Yemen and Arabia the 
Happy; their fleet ships bore the spices of the East to the 
docks of Borne and the coast of Coromandel ; their caravans 
had founded and cherished the prosperity of Hira and Pal- 
myra. But it was not from the more civilized Arabs that the 
swift storm of reform was to break over dying intellect and 
virtue. The fiery children of the desert, free, impetuous, in- 
dependent; whose companions from infancy had been the 
boundless landscape of sand and sky, the hot sun, the splendid 
wanderers of the night ; who never rested, who had no home 
nor possessions but the dromedary and a tent, were now to be 
moved by great thoughts, and to issue from Arabia armed 
with a comparative truth. Amidst the wide decay of Chris- 
tianity, the apparent flight of honesty and mental vigor from 
the earth, the cry of fallen human nature for reform was an- 
swered by a wild voice from Mecca. A Bedouin, though soft- 
ened somewhat by a more pacific life, Mohammed preached 
to the dull world God and himself. 

Mecca is described as one of those places where only neces- 
sity or habit could induce men to dwell.Q An arid valley, 
shut in by bare and rugged mountains, is watered by a few 
feeble springs that support its scanty herbage. The hot sun, 
the perpetual blasts of the desert, are imprisoned in its nar- 
row cleft, and the surrounding rocks reflect and deepen the 
torrid heat. Yet, by the vigorous impulse of a single active 
mind, the Arabian village became the rival of Rome and of 
Constantinople; and when Mohammed, half crazed by the 
problems of life and of immortality, prayed and fasted amidst 
its loftiest cliffs, he was preparing the swift destruction of 
that degenerate Christianity that had grown up in the ven- 
erable churches once tended by Mark and John.( 2 ) At his 
death his followers issued from the desert, and the sword of 
the Saracens, during the seventh and eighth centuries, per- 
fected their work of purification or of desolation. Jerusalem, 



(*) Mnir, Life of Mohammed, vol. i., p. 3. 

( 2 ) Muir's picture of the youth of the Prophet is the most complete Tve 
have. 



468 THE GBEEK CHURCH. 

strewed with Christian dead, became a Moslem shrine. The 
fate of Damascus has grown famous in prose and song. The 
Seven Churches, the crowns of seven splendid cities, have sunk 
into almost undiscoverable ruin. Thyatira is lost, and Sardis 
a brambly waste ; and travelers search in vain on the lonely 
sites for the mighty cathedrals once raised in honor of St. 
John or the Holy Wisdom, and for some trace of that mag- 
nificence that once marked the Eastern Church.Q The sword 
of the Saracens swept over Egypt and Alexandria ; the great 
see of Athanasius was reduced to a wretched shadow; the 
Mle was cleared of its swarming monasteries ; and Africa, 
Spain, and Sicily were readily taught to abandon the idols of 
Borne for the invisible deity of Mecca. 

The city of Constantinople, in this period of desolation, em- 
braced all that was yet left of the Christianity of the East, un- 
less, perhaps, a purer faith had sprung up beneath the iron 
tread of Moslem tyranny, and the virtues of an age of mar- 
tyrdom were revived among the obscure and forgotten frag- 
ments of the churches of Asia or the Nile. But all the visi- 
ble strength of the Eastern faith seemed shut up, with the 
treasures of Greek art, within the walls of Constantinople. 
Twice the vast hordes of ardent Saracens thronged around the 
trembling city ; the shores of the Bosphorus were ravaged by 
the children of the desert ; and it seemed probable that the 
Sclaves of Kussia and the Goths of Middle Europe must, with 
the fall of the capital, be reduced to adopt the doctrines and 
the Brophet of Mecca. But for the powerful walls of the 
Christian citadel, and the foresight of Constantine, rather than 
the valor of its trembling emperors and people, no human 
arm could have stayed the march of that swarm of enthusiasts 
who preached and fought for the conversion of the West; 
and a more successful crusade of the horsemen of Khorassan 
and the emirs of Mecca would have planted the crescent on 
the walls of Mentz or Worms. The trembling people guard- 
ed their gates ; the Greek fire destroyed hosts of infidels ; the 

(*) For the desolation of the Seven Churches see Burton, Arundel, and 
Chandler. 



THE POPES AND THE EASTERN CHURCH. 469 

Saracens melted away in the inclement winter ; and six centu- 
ries passed, during which Christianity fixed itself in the heart 
of Russia, and a Christian empire had civilized and conquer- 
ed the Niebelungs and the Hungarians, the Batavian and the 
Swede. The citadel of Constantine gave Christendom six 
centuries of progress before it yielded to the shocks of time 
and the rage of the Turks. 

Of this period of comparative rest the most memorable 
event was the final separation of the Greek from the Latin 
Church and the deposition of the bishop of the West from an 
equal station in the Christian hierarchy with the Patriarchs of 
Antioch and Alexandria.^) To the faithful congregations of 
the orthodox East the Latin pontiff is the Judas of the band 
of bishops. He has been deposed from his high place ; he 
is an excommunicate and accursed ; the Patriarch of Moscow 
has assumed the vacant seat created by his apostasy ; and a bit- 
ter warfare has raged between the rival churches, in which 
the praise of humanity or mercy can least be ascribed to that 
of Rome. Often the cruel Popes labored to bring bloodshed 
and disunion within the walls of Constantinople, aimed the 
assassin's dagger at its emperors, encouraged the rage of the 
crusaders, or smiled, while they trembled, at its fall. In a 
later age the persecuting fury of the Church of Rome was 
aimed against Russia and the Patriarch of Moscow. The 
Poles were incited to become the champions of Catholicism. 
For nearly a century the most fertile fields of Russia were 
desolated by the fierce missionaries of the West ; the monas- 
teries were sacked, the orthodox bishops tortured into submis- 
sion. Moscow perished in a memorable conflagration. The 
Russian hierarchy were corrupted or intimidated. A usurper, 
the tool of the Jesuits, reigned in the Holy City ; and amidst 
the scenes of national ruin, in which they had so often tri- 
umphed, the Popes seemed about to extend their spiritual em- 
pire over regions that had never felt their sway. But the 

(*) Mosheim, i., p. 513 ; Gieseler, i., p. 503 ; John Jejunator assumes the 
title of Universal Patriarch, 587 ; Gregory the Great thinks the title im- 
pious. 



470 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

Sclavic nation rose, led by its patriotic priests ; the Catholics 
were expelled with heroic courage ; and Poland has suffered 
in modern times for the cruel policy of the Jesuits and the 
guilt of its ancestors. 

The schism between the Eastern patriarchs and the Pope of 
Home sprung, no doubt, from early differences, from opposing 
interests, and from varying traditions^ 1 ) In the first century 
the mild Polycarp, who ruled, by superior sanctity, the Syrian 
churches, opposed Anicetus, the presbyter or Bishop of Pome, 
in his own city, and defended the usages of Ephesus. Anice- 
tus modestly yielded, for he was, perhaps, a disciple of Paul ;( 2 ) 
but as the Poman See grew rich and powerful, it was almost 
the first of the early churches to fall into superstitious decay. 
Its early popes, Zephyrinus, Callixtus, Victor, bear no honest 
characters. ( 3 ) Its episcopal chair became the object of in- 
trigue and corrupt ambition. Pride came with moral decay, 
and the fallen bishops of Pome hoped to hide their own spir- 
itual degradation in a fabulous claim to the succession from 
St. Peter. Conscious of their own crimes, they strove to exalt 
the authority of the office they had won by fraud or violence, 
and to dazzle the world by vain assumptions and idle display. 
More honest, because more intelligent, the bishops of the East- 
ern cities still preserved some traits of the earlier simplicity. 
The two Gregorys, Basil, Meletius, and Chrysostom might do 
credit to the church of a cultivated age ; but the Popes were 
grossly ignorant, and the Latin See a centre of moral decay. 
The pen of the ascetic Jerome has left a vigorous sketch of 
the growing vices of Pome. As the Latin prelates sunk low- 
er in barbarous ignorance, their pretensions rose; but the 
Eastern emperors treated them with little ceremony, exiled or 
punished the Popes at will, and the Patriarch of Constanti- 
nople declared himself the Universal Bishop. With the fall 
of the chief centres of Christianity in the East under the as- 
saults of the Saracens, the ambition of Pome revived. It 



(*) Mosheim, i., p. 513. 

( 2 ) Eusebius, Ecc. Hist., v., p. 24. Eusebius calls Auicetus presbyter. 

( 3 ) Milmau, Lat. Christ. 



PHOTIUS AND HIS AGE. 471 

aimed to subject or to destroy the Eastern Church, as it had 
already eradicated its rivals from Gaul or Britain, persecuted 
the Church of Scotland, and was to reduce cultivated Ireland 
to a forlorn and bleeding waste. Doctrinal differences and 
varying rites added lasting hostility to the war of ambition ; 
and the Church of Rome, to the purer faith of Constantino- 
ple, seemed lost in fatal heresy. It had added to the Nicene 
Creed, from the decrees of a Spanish council, the unauthor- 
ized filioqioe.^) It refused to allow its clergy to marry, in di- 
rect revolt from the well-known decision of Nice. Its abject 
worship of images and the Host, its ignorance, its dependence 
upon the Western barbarians, its pretension to a place above 
all the other patriarchates in honor and power, naturally ex- 
cited the disapprobation and the fear of its Eastern brethren ; 
and at length Antioch and Alexandria, Jerusalem and Con- 
stantinople, united in deposing forever from his place in the 
Christian Church the heretical and ambitious Bishop of Rome. 
The chief source of this remarkable separation, the founder 
of the independence of Eastern thought, was Photius,( 2 ) Pa- 
triarch of Constantinople. No man of his period could rival 
his various learning and his extensive acquaintance with the 
Greek classics. His vast and careful library, or selections 
from more than two hundred writers, passes over a boundless 
field of philosophy and general literature, preserves the finest 
passages of Herodotus or Plutarch, and indicates an intellect 
avid, industrious, and refined. Photius, in literary activity, 
was the Johnson, the Gibbon, of his century. As a layman he 
had traveled to the cities of the Arabs, and had been employed 
in high offices at the Byzantine court. In 858, the Patriarch 
Ignatius was deposed by the Emperor Michael, and Photius 
was raised to the first station in the Eastern Church. The 
Romish See, eager to control the politics of Constantinople, as- 
sumed the cause of Ignatius, deposed or excommunicated his 
rival, and began its ceaseless war against a scholar and a think- 

(*) The procession from the Father and the Son first appears at the Coun- 
cil of Toledo. See Gieseler, ii., p. 73. Its adoption by Protestant churches 
was indiscreet. 

( 2 ) Schuitzler, L'Empire des Tsars, 



472 THE GREEK CHUECH. 

er whose severe pen and vigorous intellect were to deal it 
blows that were never to lose their sting. In his famous en- 
cyclical, PhotiusQ reviewed the errors of the Papal See, and 
held up to the Christian Church the heresies and the corrup- 
tions of Rome. He pointed out its interpolated creed, its Jew- 
ish tendency, its pascal lamb that was eaten by Pope and bish- 
ops, its celibacy, and its countless crimes. His learning and 
his logic confounded his dull opponents, nor was there any 
one of the period who could meet his unequaled intellect in 
the field of controversy. Yet the contest was long and doubt- 
ful; the Eastern patriarchs sustained their brilliant leader; 
the West sided with the Popes. Photius was driven into ex- 
ile. Ignatius ruled in St. Sophia ; he died, and Photius was 
again restored. Even the Pope was reconciled to his return ; 
but a new emperor banished the scholar to a lonely monastery 
in Armenia, where, perhaps, he died. Gleaming out an intel- 
lectual prodigy in the dark age of general ignorance, Photius 
has won no low place in the annals of mental progress. His 
wide .reading and his acute disquisitions have not been lost to 
posterity ; his bold and patriotic defense of the liberties of 
the East saved from contempt the decisions of Nice, and re- 
pelled from half the Christian world the later abuses of Rome. 
It was the theory of the Greeks that there were £.ve patri- 
archates equal in power and authority, but that the capital 
city of the empire must hold a titular precedence in rank. So 
long as Rome remained the source of government, it had been 
allowed the primacy ; when it sunk into neglect and ruin, it 
was supplanted by the superior dignity of Constantinople.^ 2 ) 
But the severe strictures of Photius had now drawn the at- 
tention of the Eastern Churches to the false doctrines and the 
rising ambition of Rome. A century of discord was followed 
by a final separation in 1054. The Roman legates boldly af- 

( x ) The Jesuits (see Migne, Pat. Grsec, 101, 4) still rage against Photius. 
He is " callidns, hypocrita, anibitiosus, falsarius, tyrannus, attanien ingenio 
et ernditione non caruit." 

( 2 ) Mouravieff, p. 292. The Patriarch Jeremiah, in the midst of his hu- 
miliation and exile, called himself Universal Patriarch — of the whole uni- 
verse ; but the claim involves no infallibility. 



DECAY OF THE PATRIARCHATES. 473 

fixed an excommunication of the Greek emperor and his ad- 
herents to the altar of St. Sophia ; the patriarch, in reply, pro- 
nounced an anathema against the Pope. Alexandria, Anti- 
och, and Jerusalem joined in the condemnation ; nor has Rome 
ever again been admitted into the communion of the early 
churches. Soon, under Hildebrand, it seemed to grasp at 
universal empire ; and the rude crusaders saw, admired, and 
finally plundered the sacred treasures of St. Sophia. Yet the 
Greeks would never relent in their hatred of Rome. Within 
their crumbling walls, helpless before a savage foe, they cher- 
ished to the last hour of their freedom their devotion to the 
faith of Photius or of Constantine ; saw with abhorrence the 
barbarous practices of the West ; nor, even when reduced to 
a fearful slavery under the Turk, would hold any friendly in- 
tercourse with the defamers of the Mcene Council^ 1 ) 

Sadly indeed had the Nicene patriarchates fallen from that 
material splendor which had made them illustrious in the 
reign of Constantine. A few feeble and down -trodden 
Greeks represented the Church of Alexandria ; the trembling 
Patriarch of Jerusalem was seldom safe at the sepulchre or 
the cross ;( 2 ) Antioch had sunk into a Turkish town ;( 3 ) the 
Syrian shore was strewed with the wrecks of convents and ca- 
thedrals. The madmen of the crusades had nearly completed 
the destruction of the Eastern Church ; and, in the utter ruin 
of the city of Constantine, the last of the patriarchs had been 
converted into a Turkish slave. A Greek population, indeed, 
considerable in numbers, still gathered around desecrated St. 
Sophia, or occupied the fertile fields of European Turkey, 
but it was fast sinking into extreme ignorance, and the learn- 
ing and the genius that had adorned the age of Photius or 
Justinian seemed forever passed away. From the depth of 
its abasement no human power could extricate the fallen 
Church. Rome pursued its feeble rivals of Constantinople 

(*) Gieseler, ii., p., 227 (note) : " Posuit Deus ecclesiam suam in quinque 
patriarchiis," etc. 

( 2 ) William of Malmesbury, iv., p. 2 (1099), says the Saracens permitted 
the patriarch to remain. 

( 3 ) The Patriarch of Antioch removed to Damascus. See Neale. 



474 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

and Antioch with menaces and dangerous intrigues ; it would 
have rejoiced to sweep from the earth the four patriarchates 
that had condemned its heresies, its follies, or its crimes; 
and, from the time of the dull, mischievous Hildebrand, had 
threatened an instant ruin to priests or people who might dare 
to oppose its absolute rule of the earth. It seemed as if the 
moment had come for the complete submission of all Chris- 
tendom to the usurping Popes. The four patriarchs might 
well fall down and worship their prosperous brother, whom 
they had so boldly ejected from the apostolic family, but who 
had now risen to rule over all Western Europe ; whose hands 
were yet red with the blood of the Albigenses, the Yaudois, 
the Hussites, and the Lollards ; whose symbol was death to 
the heretic ; and who had resolved to drag at his spiritual tri- 
umph the nations racked by the scourge and flame, kings ter- 
rified by interdict or excommunication. 

But there had grown up meantime a new centre of Orient- 
al Christianity, inaccessible to the persecutions of Rome ; and 
the seeds of progress, nurtured amidst the hot landscapes and 
the golden clime of Syria and the South, had ripened in an 
unknown land, where Herodotus had traced the wandering 
Scythians, and the Greek dramatist had placed the scene of 
his grandest fables. The Eastern Church seemed transplant- 
ed without a change to the boundless wilderness of mediaeval 
Russia. Q Monks and anchorites, more hardy and more ter- 
rible in their asceticism than those who had swarmed around 
Paul and Anthony in the Egyptian deserts, or had founded 
the sacred fortresses of Mount Athos, had lived and prayed 
amidst the Russian steppes, borne the fierce rigors of an arc- 
tic climate, and met with joy the frozen horrors of the North- 
ern seas. Moscow and Novgorod were belted with a chain of 
massive convents, from whose lofty walls the conquering Tar- 
tars had been repelled with shame. The bare islands of the 
Arctic Ocean, where even the hardy Esquimaux had failed to 

(*) Curzon, Levant, p. 340, etc., describes the fortress monasteries of 
Mount Athos; they are revived in the Holy Trinity of Moscow. See 
Lowth, Kremlin. For Solovetsky, see Dixon's pleasant picture of that 
wonderful community, flourishing in an arctic waste. 



BUSSIAN ASCETICS. 475 

find a habitation, were covered with the rude huts of Russian 
monks. Nor have the annals of asceticism any examples of 
human endurance that can compare with the self -chosen pains 
of Sergius, or Savatie, or Mkon. To their penance and their 
toils the labors of Benedict were light, the discipline of Loy- 
ola a life of indulgence. They fled to the lonely birch wood 
or the frozen island. Hunger ; solitude ; the horrors of a cli- 
mate where winter and night ruled for half the year, the sum- 
mer burning, but not invigorating, the earth; the plague of ; 
countless stinging insects, from whose assaults the wild beasts 
fled in terror ; malaria and gloom — failed to check their devo- 
tion or disturb their holy meditations. Lives of strange aus- 
terity and patient faith have rolled on unrecorded in these 
frightful retreats. The heroism of the squalid and savage 
saint was often never recognized until his emaciated frame 
was seen no more among men ;(*) but over his poor remains, 
now more valued than heaps of gems, his superstitious coun- 
trymen would erect a magnificent convent, and kings and 
prelates bring their treasures to his shrine. Labor was always 
the duty of a Russian monk ; sometimes intense study was 
joined to his devotions ; and minds fortified by abstinence, 
bodies hardened to superhuman endurance, natural capacities 
enlarged by rigorous culture, have formed in the convent or 
the hermitage many of the men who have proved most useful 
to the progress of the Sclavonic race. 

If the monasteries of Mount Athos or Ararat were success- 
fully copied in the Lauras of Moscow and Solovetsky, not less 
carefully were the patriarchates and bishoprics, the rituals 
and the cathedrals, of Antioch or Constantinople renewed in 
the Russian steppes. At Kief, for three centuries the centre 
of Russian Christendom, the bishop or metropolitan was usu- 
ally borrowed or ordained from the court of the Caesars. At 
Novgorod, and afterward at Moscow, arose a chain of curious 
churches — low, covered with glittering and fantastic domes, 



(') Sergius, Basil, the wild hermits mentioned by a series of travelers, 
the founders of Solovetsky : the more recent hermits in Eussia are more 
Oriental than Western monks, are dervishes or Brahmin devotees. 



476 THE GREEK CRUBCR. 

and shining within with a rude imitation of St. Sophia. At 
Moscow a patriarch was appointed,^) with the consent of the 
four ancient patriarchates, to take the place of heretical 
Rome. A priesthood, bearded, robed, and disciplined in the 
Greek model, formed his missionary aid ; and the soft music, 
the melodious ritual, and the classic processions and chants 
that had won the hearts of the early Russians were swiftly 
scattered through the countless congregations that sprung up 
in the frozen North. The library of Photius and the sermons 
of Chrysostom became familiar to the Russian priest, at least 
in name. The manners, looks, dress, and carriage of the people 
of Constantinople were transferred to the towns and cities of 
Russia. The czars boasted a descent from the successors of 
Constantine, and traced a lineage back to Philip and Alexan- 
der, revived in their families the classic names, and ceased to 
be altogether barbarous. Nor did the four Eastern patriarch- 
ates see without exultation the rise of that vigorous power 
whose devotion to the creed of Nice might prove a safe- 
guard against the ambition of Rome, and in some distant hour 
relieve Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Jerusalem 
from their bitter subjection to the Turk. Not seldom the 
oppressed and trembling patriarchs from the South made 
their way, in poverty and contempt, to the Russian court, and 
were received with honor, emoluments, and signal veneration 
by the rulers and the people. Through many a period of 
danger the Russian patriarchate has extended a kindly aid to 
its feebler brethren, has protected the Greek population of 
Turkey, has shielded the Patriarch of Jerusalem from the 
malice of his Latin rival, and rescued the Holy Places from 
the sole custody of the Roman heretic; and one,( 2 ) perhaps 
the ruling, cause of the Crimean war was the religious ques- 
tion of the Holy Sepulchre and the keen affront offered by 
the unscrupulous ruler of France, in the interest of the pa- 

(*) Mouravieff : in 1587. Jeremiah seems, at least, to have heen no im- 
postor. See Mouravieff 's Appendix, Dis. on Jeremiah. 

( 2 ) Kinglake, Crimean War : " By causing a persistent, hostile use to he 
made of the fleet," vol. i. ; p. 487. The French emperor fanned the quarrels 
of the churches. 



BURIK. 477 

pacy or of himself, to the Eastern Church. Nor can it be 
doubted that the new Constantine who is to rescue the ancient 
seats of Christianity from the rule of Islam will come from 
the North, and that the &yq Eastern patriarchates, united and 
vigorous, must once more taste an uninterrupted freedom. 

A fair - haired Swede or Norseman — Rurik — in the year 
862, when Alfred was about to rescue England from Dan- 
ish barbarism, and when the empire of the great Charles 
had dissolved into warring fragments, entered Russia at the 
invitation of its Sclavonic tribes, and founded at Kief and 
Novgorod the central fabric of the Russian power. (*) With 
flowing locks and stalwart forms, the hardy Norsemen ruled 
with vigor, and brought comparative repose to the obedient 
people ; but they were pagans, worshiping gods formed from 
huge logs of wood, grotesquely carved and adorned with 
gems.( 2 ) They had heard by report of the wonders of civili- 
zation, of the splendid city to the southward on the shores of 
the Euxine, rich with the treasures of commerce and of art ; 
and more than once great fleets of the avaricious and inquisi- 
tive barbarians had assailed the port and the walls of Con T 
stantinople, confident in their own strength, and conscious, per- 
haps, of the cowardice of the Greeks. Once the city would 
have fallen had not the learned patriarch, Photius, worked a 
miracle by touching the sea with the holy garments of the 
Yirgin. The sea rose in a violent storm, and dashed in pieces 
the frail vessels of the barbarians. Later emperors were con- 
tent to purchase their forbearance by lavish gifts. A friend- 
ly intercourse was established between the Russians and the 
Greeks ; and at length a royal convert, the Princess Olga, was 
baptized, with imposing ceremonies, at Constantinople, re- 
ceived the august name of Helena, the mother of Constantine, 
and strove to win over her countrymen from the worship of 

(*) Karamsin gives from Nestor, Nikon, and the annalists his clear and 
interesting narrative. See vol. i., Sources de l'Hist. de Kuss., Les Chro- 
niques. The name of Rurik was common in France (p. 53) among its in- 
vaders. 

( 2 ) Karamsin, vol. i., pp. 62, 99, describes the superstition, the ignorance 
of the Sclaves. 



478 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

idols to the Nicene faith. She was unsuccessful; yet the 
name of Olga, the first Christian princess, is venerated and pre- 
served in the reigning family of the czars. Her grandson, Vla- 
dimir (988), founds the Russian Church. A rude and sim- 
ple savage, cruel and terrible, his conversion to the faith of 
Constantine is the dawn of Russian civilization, the chief event 
in the history of Eastern progress. He heard, it is said, the 
arguments of the envoys of various religions. The Mussul- 
mans of the Yolga pressed him to believe in their Prophet, 
the Western Christians in their Pope, the Jew in Moses, the 
Greek philosophers in Attic culture. The ferocious ruler 
listened, but sent an embassy to Constantinople to observe the 
manners and the faith of the city of the Csesars.Q Basil, the 
emperor, and his acute patriarch prepared a religious spectacle 
of rare magnificence to dazzle and convert their savage and 
simple guests. It was a high festival. St. Sophia, magnifi- 
cent in gold and mosaic, blazed with a thousand lights. The 
Russian envoys were placed in a position whence, at a single 
glance, they might survey the splendors of the noblest of 
Christian churches, and a ritual that had been adorned by the 
costly devices of ages. Accustomed only to the rude wor- 
ship of their forest gods, the simple Sclaves were converted 
by a splendid show that seemed the foretaste of Asgard or 
of Paradise. The incense smoked, the chants resounded, the 
patriarch, gleaming with gems and gold, entered the church ; 
but when the long procession of acolytes and deacons, bearing 
torches in their hands,' and with white wings on their shoul- 
ders, passed out of the sanctuary, and all the people fell on 
their knees, shouting " Kyrie Eleison !" the Russians, supposing 
the white-winged children to be angels, took their guides by 
the hand and expressed their wonder and their awe. " Do you 
not know," said the acute Greeks, " that the angels are sent 
down from heaven to join in our services ?" " We are con- 
vinced!" cried the Russians. "Let us return home." The 



(*) Photius claimed the conversion of the Russians. The Russians assert 
that St. Andrew visited Kief; but the influence of saint or bishop was fee- 
ble. See Schnitzler, L'Empire des Tsars, iii. ; p. 485. 



VLADIMIR CONVERTED. 479 

pious or the impious fraud, aud the matchless pageant of St. 
Sophia, had converted a nation ; nor could the dull Justinian, 
when he labored to perfect his favorite shrine, have conceived, 
amidst all his exultation, that the magnificent dome and the 
silver altar, the gleaming lights and graceful ritual, of his ca- 
thedral would allure half the world to the faith of Nice. 

Vladimir received the account of his envoys with some hes- 
itation. He besieged the city of Kherson, in the Crimea, and 
vowed that, should he succeed in taking it, he would be bap- 
tized. The city yielded, torn and bleeding, to its savage foe ; 
but still the slow convert hesitated. He sent an embassy to 
the Emperor Basil, demanding his sister in marriage. He 
promised, on that condition, to become a Christian. He threat- 
ened that, if he were refused, he would lay Constantinople as 
low as Kherson. Anne, sister of Basil, nurtured in the luxu- 
ry of a Byzantine palace, was the victim led forth to grace the 
rude lodge of the Sclavonic prince. Q Her sister already sat 
upon the German throne. Anne, most effective of mission- 
aries, bore Christianity to the wild tribes of the frozen North, 
and with more fortitude or resignation, perhaps, than a Xavier 
or a Boniface, gave her hand to her ferocious suitor, and saved 
her country and her faith. Yladimir was baptized. He con- 
verted the Russians by no inconclusive arguments. He or- 
dered the whole population of Kief, his capital, to be im- 
mersed in the swelling river, while the priests read prayers 
upon the banks. The huge log of wood, Peroun, which had 
for generations been the object of adoration to the savage 
Russians, was dragged at the horse's tail over mount and vale, 
was scourged by twelve mounted lictors,( 2 ) and thrown into 
the Dnieper ; and Yladimir the Great, the near connection of 
the Christian emperors of Germany and of Constantinople, in 
the close of the tenth century, strove to reform Russia, and 
perhaps himself. It was that mournful epoch, the year 1000, 
when all Catholic Europe, plunged in ignorance and general 

(*) Schnitzler, iii., p. 489. 

C) Karamsin, i., p. 109, describes the god Peroun, " Dieu de la foudre — de 
bois, avec une t6te d'argent et des moustaches d'or." Yet Peroun might 
compare favorably with a Bambino or a piece of the true cross. 



480 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

woe, was watching for the last hour of existence, when it was 
believed that the heavens must soon melt in a general confla- 
gration, and the earth perish in seas of fire. A wave of relig- 
ions excitement passed over Germany and France; pilgrims 
flocked in nnnsnal numbers to the Holy Sepulchre ; the altars 
were thronged with ceaseless worshipers ; and Russia, sharing 
in the general revival, seems to have gladly welcomed the 
Greek missionaries. Churches were built at Kief in imitation 
of St. Sophia ; Byzantine bishops ruled in the royal city ; 
and the docile, placable, imaginative Sclaves began to adopt 
the manners of Constantinople, and share the virtues and vices 
of the Greeks. 

From the year 1000 — no ominous period to Eastern civili- 
zationQ — Russia begins its career as a Christian nation ; was 
the spiritual offspring of the Byzantine Church ; received its 
ordination from St. Sophia, its bishops from the schools of 
Constantinople ; obtained an alphabet formed from the Greek, 
read the Scriptures in the Sclavonic tongue ; was transformed 
from utter barbarism to a softer culture, and learned the worth 
of education. Five centuries pass on over the varying fort- 
unes of the Russian Church ; the descendants of Rurik and 
of Yladimir still rule over the Sclavonic race ; the feeble rays 
of Constantinopolitan civilization extend themselves more and 
more over the savage tribes. But the wide disasters that have 
fallen upon Eastern Christianity seem once more to threaten 
its extinction. For two centuries the vast hordes of Tartars, 
from Genghis-Khan to Tamerlane, desolated the fairest fields 
of Russia, and reduced almost to a savage wilderness the land 
that had seemed about to surpass Western Europe in civil and 
religious progress. A few huge and battlemented monasteries 
defied the rage of the invaders, and alone kept alive the faith 
and the liberty of the Sclaves. In the midst of their humil- 
iation, the Bishops of Moscow and Kief beheld the sudden 
fall of the Holy City whence had come their earliest inspira- 



( x ) In tbis year Gerbert was Pope, and Europe lost in ignorance. Tbe 
Pope seemed a sorcerer; tbe nobles and tbe kings could seldom read or 
write. 



IVAN THE TERRIBLE. 481 

tion. Constantinople sunk before the arms of Mohammed. Q 
St. Sophia was desecrated by an alien worship. A common 
ruin had ingulfed the five great Eastern patriarchates. Mean- 
time their ambitions rival in the West had fixed its suprem- 
acy over all the European powers, and was already exciting 
Catholic Poland to crush the last elements of Russian free- 
dom, to enforce the heresies of Rome upon Moscow or Nov- 
gorod.( 2 ) 

In the sixteenth century, torn by generations of discord and 
of hostile ravages, Russia began once more to rise into greatness. 
From 1533 to 1584, Ivan the Terrible, a barbarian more cruel 
and more frightful in his rage than his ancestors Rurik and 
Yladimir, ruled with success over the reviving nation, and in 
his moments of sanity renewed the sources of Russian civiliza- 
tion. He introduced the printing - press, opened a commerce 
with England, advanced the progress of the Church. The 
contemporary of Henry YIII. and Edward YL, of Elizabeth 
— whose hand he is said to have demanded — of Charles Y. 
and Francis I., the name of Russia was now again familiar to 
Western Europe, sullied by the horrible renown of Ivan, 
who was reported to have surpassed the crimes and cruelties 
of all the tyrants of the past. His early rule had been mark- 
ed by piety and generous patriotism; for thirteen years he 
seemed a Christian hero, destined to adorn his age by generous 
deeds. Then a cloud passed over his intellect ; he sunk into 
gross vice and loathsome cruelty ; his nobles, his courtiers, and 
his people perished wherever he came ; he blotted whole towns 
from existence ; he covered the land with bloodshed. It was 
his amusement to see hale and lusty monks torn to pieces by 
wild beasts, to inspect his innocent victims as they writhed in 
fearful tortures. Yet was his zeal for religion so ardent that 

(*) Von Hammer, Ges. Osman. R., i.,p. 549, describes with vigor the fate 
of St. Sophia and its worshipers. 

( 2 ) Hildebrand, among his wide pretensions, claimed Russia as belonging 
to Rome. In their extravagant folly the Popes fancied that the earth 
belonged to them as the vicegerents of Christ, and proceeded to exercise 
their authority. The notion has been revived and fixed by the recent 
council. The Popes gave Ireland to the English, and America to Spain. 

31 



482 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

he often retired to a monastery for pious meditation, rang the 
matin bell himself at three in the morning, and passed whole 
days in prayer. Monster, fanatic, to whose crimes Henry 
VIII. might seem merciful, or Charles V. benevolent, Ivan the 
Terrible ruled over his submissive people with a sway perfect 
in its despotism. His people revered him with a strange in- 
fatuation ; the assassin's dagger was never raised against him ; 
and he died in old age, after a long and prosperous reign, and 
was laid in the crypts of the Kremlin. 

Moscow, on the banks of the beautiful Moskwa, the Holy 
City of the Russians, was now become the capital of an em- 
pire vigorous and united; nor has any metropolis ever so 
fixed the affections and the reverence of a whole people, or 
become so perfectly the hallowed shrine of a national faith. 
Not Ephesus was as dear to the languid Syrian, nor Constan- 
tinople to the Greek. Q Holy Moscow, belted with convents, 
crowned with the rich spiritual and material splendors of the 
Kremlin, with the tombs of the czars and the bones of the 
saints, has become to the fanciful and ardent Russian a spot 
consecrated in the annals of religion and of his country. Pil- 
grims in yearly inundations have flocked to it from all the bor- 
ders of a land where pilgrimages are yet a sacred duty ; the czar 
and the serf, the Siberian and the Cossack, meet in the Church 
of the Assumption, or lay their various offerings in the treas- 
ury of the monks of the Holy Trinity. The traveler who pass- 
es swiftly between the endless forests of the level country sees, 
as he draws near and stands on the neighboring hills, a rich 
and wonderful city, crowned with a glittering circle of cupo- 
las, blue, red, green, or gold, and teeming everywhere with the 
emblems of the Kicene faith. One strange building near the 
Kremlin is the wildest that fancy ever conceived. Basil, a 

(*) " Our men say," writes Richard Chancellor, " that in higness it " 
(Moscow) " is as great as the City of London, with the suburbs thereof." 
He notices the nine churches of the Kremlin ; the majesty of Ivan the 
Terrible, his jewels, gold, his diadem, and his courtiers clad in cloth of 
gold; the beauty of Moscow, the wooden houses of the Russians, their 
Greek faith. He went to Russia in 1553. He describes their long fasts, 
their service in their own tongue, their leavened bread at the communion. 



THE KREMLIN. 483 

hermit, naked and bound with an iron chain, winter or sum- 
mer, wandered through the streets of Moscow. He alone 
dared to rebuke the old emperor, Ivan the Terrible, for his 
fearful crimes ; and when the hermit died, Ivan resolved to 
build a cathedral over the tomb of the saint. It was one 
madman doing honor to another ; and day after day the aged 
tyrant sat in his tower on the Kremlin watching the strange 
building rise like an exhalation ; the pagodas, cupolas, stair- 
cases, pinnacles, blend in wild confusion, and his own mad 
dreams shape themselves in stone. Justinian had built on in 
dull imbecility ; Ivan in furious lunacy. At length the mad- 
dest of architectural designs was finished, and the emperor 
put out the eyes of his architect lest he might build another 
cathedral as surpassingly fair as his own.Q 

In the Kremlin centres the swelling tide of Russian faith ; 
in the Cathedral of Michael the Archangel lie ranged around 
the walls the long succession of the buried czars until near 
the period of Peter the Great ; in the chapel or church of the 
Repose of the Yirgin, from Ivan the Terrible, the czars have 
been crowned ; in its tower the Russian primates were elect- 
ed. It is crowded with pictures hallowed by entrancing asso- 
ciations to the imaginative people, and rich with relics dear to 
the Russian and the Greek. Within the Kremlin a glitter of 
enchantment seems to hang over the path of the visitor ; the 
ground he treads is the holiest upon earth to countless pil- 
grims ; on every side he sees the peasant casting himself on 
the bare stones ; the priests employed in ceaseless adoration ; 
palaces splendid with the decorations of ages, and gay church- 
es stored with gems and gold, before whose priceless treasures 
even the wealth of St. Sophia and of Constantinople might 
seem only tolerable indigence ;( 2 ) nor anywhere has the gor- 

( T ) Schnitzler, La Russie, La Pologne, etc., p. 63. It resembles " ces con- 
cretions de stalactites ou la nature imite l'art." Lowth, Kremlin, has some 
clear pictures. Spottiswoode thinks Moscow more beautiful in winter, 
covered with snow, than in summer, p. 245. 

( 2 ) Dicey, A Month in Russia, 1866, gives a lively picture of Moscow. 
" The wealth of Russia," he says, " would not suffice to buy the treasures 
of the cathedral church at Moscow," p. 108. 



484 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

geous taste for glittering baubles and wasteful pomp, the lega- 
cy of the Byzantine court, been so carefully applied as within 
the grotesque battlements of the Kremlin Hill. It resembles 
one of the robber caves of the Arabian legend, where the 
spoil of generations of plunderers was heaped up in masses of 
uncounted wealth. Moscow spreads broad and prosperous 
around its ancient fortress, the Constantinople of the North. 
Sixty miles from the Holy City, in the midst of the wild and 
endless forest, sprung up in the year 1338 the Monastery of 
the Holy Trinity. When the Black Death was desolating the 
human race, and the vices of men seemed about to bring their 
own extirpation, the solemn refuge of meditative souls grew 
into a vast assemblage of buildings ; its huge and lofty walls, 
its wide circuit of churches and convents, its swarm of brave 
as well as pious monks, defied the rage of the Tartar hordes ; 
and from the battlements of the Holy Trinity saints and an- 
chorites, bishops and deacons, summoned their countrymen to 
the holy wars against pagan Cossack or Catholic Pole.( l ) Her- 
mits more than once have saved Russia. Sergius, the Tell, 
the Wallace of his country, was a wild anchorite, hiding in 
impenetrable forests.( 2 ) At the battle of the Don (1380) his 
prayers and the valor of his monks, clothed in steel, broke the 
power of the Tartars. From the moat and the towers of the 
Holy Trinity the Catholic Poles (1613) were beaten back in a 
wild confusion of fighting monks and raging demons ; nor, 
had the convent of Sergius fallen — the last retreat of Russian 
freedom — would the Pope and the Jesuits ever have released 
from their grasp the sinking fabric of the Russian Church. 

The sacred city became, in 1587, the seat of the fifth patri- 
archate, and assumed, in the opinion of the East, the place 
made vacant by the fall of the Roman See. Jeremiah, a 
wandering patriarch from Constantinople, consecrated his 
brother Job of Moscow ; the Kremlin resounded with thanks- 

(*) Schnitzler, La Russie, etc., p. 97 : "Le monastere fnt un refuge pour 
les vrais enfans de la patrie, et ses tre'sors solderent les deTeuseurs," etc. 

( a ) Sergius is called the father of Russian mouasticism. Mouravieff, 
p. 63. He preferred to die, as lie had lived, in poverty, and refused the re- 
wards offered him for saving his country. 



BOBIS GODUXOFF. 485 

giving ; the nappy czar loaded the Greek prelate with gener- 
ous gifts ; Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem welcomed the 
new representative of the Nicene hierarchy ; Russia was fill- 
ed with holy joy, and the Patriarch of Moscow ruled over 
the Sclavonic Church. Q Yet never were the Eastern patri- 
archates nearer their destruction ; and Russia was now to pre- 
pare for that final struggle with the Pope, the Jesuits, and the 
Poles, from which she arose, at length, wounded and bleed- 
ing, to a new career. In the close of the sixteenth century, 
Theodore, the last of the descendants of Rurik, sat on the 
throne of the czars. His mildness, his weakness, and his su- 
perstition had left him little real authority. The bold, aspir- 
ing, unscrupulous Boris Godunoff ruled in the name of his 
master. Already Boris had stained his conscience with a 
fearful crime, and had procured the assassination of Prince 
Demetrius, the half-brother of Theodore, and the only heir to 
the crown. Demetrius was eight years old when his mer- 
ciless enemy removed him from his path. When the pious 
Theodore died, childless, Boris Godunoff, who had so. long 
ruled the nation, was chosen czar of all the Russias in his 
place. Moscow rang with festivities. ( 2 ) The Patriarch Job 
was the devoted friend of Boris ; nor, in the moment of his 
coronation and his triumph, could the usurper have ever 
dreamed that the shade of his victim, the holy child Demetri- 
us, the last of the race of Rurik, would fall ominously across 
his upward way. 

Raised from a private station to an imperial crown, Boris 
resolved to marry his two children among the royal fami- 
lies of Europe. His son, Theodore, the heir of the Russian 
throne, was destined, he thought, to win a princess. His 
daughter, Xenia, fair, graceful, with thick black hair and 
sparkling eyes,( 3 ) he betrothed to Prince John of Denmark. 

C) Mouravieff. 

( 2 ) Karamsin, xi., pp. 50, 54. Boris begins to reign 1598; Moscow re- 
joices. 

( 3 ) " Boris cherchant pour sa rille un e"poux digne d'elle, parmi les princes 
Europeans de sang royal," p. 54 In the year 1600 Boris was full of hope, 
p. 123. 



486 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

All was made ready for the wedding. The fair bride had 
seen her husband at a distance, when suddenly Prince John 
was seized with a mortal sickness, and died in the midst of 
the gayeties of Moscow. Yet still Boris Godunoff, in the 
year 1600, was at the height of his prosperity. His authority 
was undisputed; his pious zeal conspicuous; he lived with 
his family in the palace of the czars, and fought with suc- 
cess at the head of his armies. One danger alone seemed to 
threaten him : the Jesuits ruled at the court of Sigismund of 
Poland, and, with that peculiar union of logic and of violence 
which has marked so many of their assaults upon nations, 
were winning over the Russian bishops to an alliance with 
Pome, or urging the Poles to invade the heretical empire. 
But what they most desired was to awaken civil discord 
among the Pussians, to divide the Church and the nation, and 
to launch the immense force of Poland, then in its mature 
strength, against the walls of Moscow. ( x ) 

Nor was it long before the opportunity they had looked for 
came. A sudden check marred the career of the prosperous 
Boris. He grew suspicious and tyrannical almost in a mo- 
ment : the memory of Demetrius, his innocent victim, the in- 
trigues of the Jesuits, and the reproaches of his people, may 
have conspired to change him to a cruel tyrant. He im- 
prisoned or put to death the noblest Pussians, and no house 
suffered more deeply than that of Bomanoff, the founder of 
the present line of czars. To add to his dangers, a wet sum- 
mer brought famine over Pussia ; a pestilence followed ;( 2 ) 
robbery and murders filled all the realm ; and brigands wan- 
dered through the streets of Moscow. The keen Jesuits — 

.(*) Karamsin, xi., p. 170, attributes the success of Demetrius to the 
Jesuits and the papal influence. And Mouravieff describes the mischiev- 
ous labors of the Jesuit Possevin, the spread of Romish influence from 
Poland among the Eussian bishops, the defection of many, the progress of 
the Unia, or the party advocating submission to Rome. That the war of 
the pretender was a religious one — an assault of Rome upon the Greek 
Church — no one will deny. Of its cruel results to Russia and to Poland 
all later history is full. 

( 2 ) Karamsin, xi., pp. 131, 132. 



THE FALSE DEMETRIUS. 487 

such, at least, is the Russian narrative — now resolved to dis- 
tract the suffering realm by a civil war, to destroy the lib- 
erties of the Russian Church, and plant the papal banner in 
the heart of the Kremlin. Q There was a monk named Greg- 
ory Otriepieff, whose character was vicious, but who was 
quick and subtle; he had been a favorite of the Patriarch 
Job, and had seen much of the royal family. One day he ex- 
claimed, to the wonder of his fellow-monks, " I shall yet be 
Czar at Moscow." He wandered from convent to convent ; 
he fled to Poland, and there, at the house of a wealthy noble, 
pretended sicknesss ; he sent for a confessor who was a Jes- 
uit, and revealed his secret. He was, he said, the Prince De- 
metrius, who was supposed to have been murdered by Boris 
Godunoff, but who had escaped by a friendly exchange. 

The secret was revealed by the incautious father. Sigis- 
mund, King of Poland, was induced to patronize the impos- 
tor ; the papal nuncio at Warsaw and the Pope, Clement 
VIII. , joined in the project, and Demetrius, or Gregory, was 
acknowledged as the lawful monarch of all the Russias. He 
was privately reconciled to the Romish Church by the Jesuit 
fathers, and pledged himself to restore his empire, should he 
regain it, to the papal faith. Gregory was of middle size, 
graceful, his eyes blue, his hair auburn or red ; one of his legs 
was shorter than the other ; he had several marks upon his 
person that it was claimed proved him to have been the true 
Demetrius.( 2 ) His intellect was quick and cultivated, his air 
noble and pleasing, his disposition generous, and his tempera- 
ment sanguine. He had won the affections of Marina, the 



(*) Mouravieff, p. 147. Karamsin, xi., p. 160, calls the pretender " le fils 
d'lin pauvre gentilhoninie de Galitche nomine" Jouri Otriepieff." Schnitzler, 
L'Empire des Tsars, p. 508, gives a clear and brief account of the Unia. 

( 2 ) The question of the identity of Gregory with Demetrius is sometimes 
revived. In the last century Professor Miiller is said to have argued 
against it, yet doubted. See Coxe, Russia, App. It was noticed that the 
great nobles went out to meet him ; that his mother received him ; that 
she never openly disowned him, etc. But the Patriarch Job, who could 
best detect the imposture, was his steady opponent. Karamsin and Mou- 
ravieff do not doubt. 



488 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

ambitious and haughty daughter of the Yoivode of Sendomir, 
whom he had promised to place on the throne of Moscow, and 
her father's wealth aided in providing the forces with which 
he first invaded Russia. Never, indeed, was there a less promis- 
ing undertaking. To enter a powerful empire, to assail a vigor- 
ous and active prince, to defy a church endeared to the whole 
nation, and plan the conversion by force of a hostile realm, 
was a project so extravagant as could only be equaled in the 
annals of fanaticism or of madness. Twice the undisciplined 
forces led by Gregory and the Jesuits were defeated. The 
Russian Church excommunicated him ; Boris seemed firmly 
seated on his throne ; Moscow, in the midst of the national 
calamities, shone with festivity ; and scarcely did it seem that 
Gregory and Marina would ever occupy the palace of the 
Kremlin, or papal priests defile the altars of the Annuncia- 
tion. 

It is impossible to unravel the dark intrigues of this singu- 
lar story, yet suddenly, in the midst of his power, Boris died, 
and the emissaries of Demetrius appear in the heart of the 
capital. His proclamations were in every hand. The great 
nobles assumed his cause, the people rose in his favor. The 
young czar, Theodore, with his mother, was dragged from the 
splendors of the Kremlin to perish by a horrible death ; and 
soon, amidst a great throng of princes and boyars, Demetrius 
entered the capital, accompanied by his Jesuit advisers, and 
was hailed by his countrymen as the last of the house of Ru- 
rik. One touching scene was arranged to strike the attention 
of the multitude. The mother of the murdered Demetrius 
was still alive, hidden in a convent, and known only as the 
nun Martha. She was brought forth, by what influences can 
never be known, to acknowledge Gregory as her son. They 
met before all the people. (') They embraced with a profu- 
sion of tears. The impostor led his pretended mother into a 
tent near at hand, and there, after so many years of sepa- 
ration, they indulged in a tender interview ; it was told in 

C) Karamsin, xi., p. 191. Mouravieff, p. 151, says that the Martha testi- 
fied silently to his person, 



MARINA. 489 

Moscow, that the czarina at once knew and rejoiced over her 
long-lost son. 

Marina, the proud Pole, with a throng of her countrymen, 
hastened to the capital to share in the triumph of her hus- 
band, and amidst a wild scene of revelry and strange rejoi- 
cing^) Gregory and his wife were crowned in the Kremlin. 
The impostor sat on a throne of gold ; Marina, at his side, on 
one of silver; their splendor mocked the miseries of their 
country. Moscow seemed now fallen into the hands of the 
Poles and the Romanists; the papal priests desecrated the 
churches of the Kremlin ; the Jesuits pressed their scheme of 
reducing the Russian bishops to a submission to Pome ; the 
impostor scoffed at the usages of the National Church, and 
filled the high offices of the court with foreigners. A deep 
discontent sprung up through all the unhappy realm; the 
horrors of a foreign tyranny, the rule of the hated Jesuits and 
Poles, the dissolute morals of the new czar, who wasted his 
life in light amusements or fatal indulgence, roused the dis- 
gust of the clergy and the people, and from the walls of the 
convent of the Holy Trinity the Eastern Church still defied 
the arts of Pome. The imposture of Gregory was every- 
where proclaimed. A new insurrection was planned. One 
night the tocsin sounded over the cupolas of Moscow ; the in- 
surgents hastened to the palace, and Gregory, flying in terror 
from room to room, at last threw himself from a window, and 
fell, maimed and bleeding, on the pavement below. He was 
put to death. Marina, the Poles, and the Jesuits were suffer- 
ed to escape, and a new czar was chosen, whose reign soon 
closed in general anarchy. All Russia was weighed down by 
rebellion, discord, famine, and boundless woe ; the ties of so- 
ciety were torn asunder ; the flames of blazing villages, the 
strife of rival factions, the desolation of the Russian Church, 
marked the final fall of the dynasty of Rurik. 

Touched neither by remorse nor compassion at the spec- 
tacle of the frightful woes they had aided so largely in bring- 
ing upon the miserable Russians, the Jesuits and the Poles, re- 

(*) Mouravieff, p. 151. 



490 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

joicing at the opportunity, resolved to win by violence what 
they had vainly attempted by f rand, and, through new seas of 
bloodshed and devastation, to destroy forever the stronghold 
of the Nicene faith. Eome succeeded for a moment in fixing 
its deadly fangs in the heart of the sister Church. Poland is 
supposed to have attained under Sigismund III. the height of 
its martial and intellectual glory ; its men of letters are reck- 
oned in long lists of doubtful excellence, and "Warsaw shone 
with the faint radiance of a dawning civilization. Q Its hu- 
manity, however, does not seem to have been conspicuous. 
Sigismund made war upon perishing Eussia. With a fine 
army of thirty thousand men he crossed the border, took 
Smolensk, reduced Livonia, and appeared before the walls of 
Moscow. The capital yielded, and the hated standards of the 
Poles, the heretical emblems of Eomish supremacy, ruled over 
the gay cupolas of the Kremlin. So low had the great empire 
fallen, that a son of the Polish king was elected Czar of all 
the Eussias, and Moscow, the Holy City of Eastern Christen- 
dom, had almost sunk into an appanage of hated Eome. Yet 
still from the brick walls and tall towers of the Holy Trinity,( 2 ) 
now become the last stronghold of the Eastern faith, while 
the Swedes ravaged Eussia in the north, and the Poles held 
its fairest provinces, a brave monk proclaimed a deathless re- 
sistance to the invaders. The vast wealth of the famous mon- 
astery was applied to no useless aim. The Swedes for sixteen 
months besieged in vain the holy fortress, and at length Mos- 
cow was set on fire, and all except the blackened Kremlin was 
leveled with the ground. The Poles and the Jesuits fled 
from the wild rage of Eussian monks and a superstitious peo- 
ple. The first of the Eomanoffs was placed on the throne, 
and, with shame and horror, Eussia threw off the yoke of the 
fallen Pope, which had for a moment defiled the Holy City of 
the East. 

(*) Hist, de la Pologne, Cheve": "Sigismund dtait attache* aux Je"suites. 
II voyait avec plaisir quelle ardeur ils de'ployaient pour la conversion des 
he're'tiques," etc., ii. ? pp. 77, 87. Cheve" reckons up a list of more than a thou- 
sand eminent Poles. 

( 2 ) Mouravieff, p. 1C5. 



IRE ROMANOFFS. 491 

The son of a bishop, the representative of a mercantile 
family, whose plain honse is still preserved by their imperial 
descendants at Moscow, Michael Romanoff became Czar of 
Russia. His father, the Patriarch Philaret, a person of learn- 
ing and of virtue, guided his councils. The country and its 
Church slowly recovered from the dangerous wounds they had 
received from the Jesuits and the Poles, yet the wide prov- 
inces torn from Russia by Sigismund, the humiliating peace 
with Poland (1613), the ravages of the Swedes, had checked 
its progress or blighted its prosperity. The young czar was 
forced to give up to Sigismund new territories, to be added to 
the spiritual empire of the Pope. It is related of this period 
that Russia, apparently shut out forever from European con- 
quests^ 1 ) began to spread its authority over the icy wastes of 
Siberia. Yet, as the son of a priest had restored the peace of 
his country, a wild, huge, stern, impulsive hermit renewed the 
vigor of its Government and reformed its Church. Savage 
and scholar, priest or executioner, the brutal Nikon ruled over 
the court and the monasteries of Russia with signal power, 
and the rites and the culture of Russian Christianity have re- 
ceived their final molding from his rude yet original hand. 

Of all the eminent names of the seventeenth century, that 
of Nikon is least known to the West, yet most honored in the 
East.( 2 ) The gigantic reformer was seven feet in stature, his 
frame stalwart and vigorous, his complexion ruddy, his eyes 
blood-shot, his countenance severe and terrible. He was born 
a peasant ; his huge frame was inured in childhood to hard- 
ship and labor ; in his youth he met with a copy of the Script- 
ures, and, seized with that strong religious impulse so common 
to his country, he fled secretly from his father's house to hide 
himself in the recesses of a convent. Remorse, contrition, 
hope, despair, such as a Bunyan or a Baxter may have felt or 
described, had probably seized upon the iron nature of the huge 
Sclave and driven him to silent meditation or secret prayer. 

(*) Mouravieff, p. 181. From this period begins the spread of Russia to- 
ward the East. 

( 2 ) Mouravieff, p. 193 j Stanley. 



492 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

His father, however, succeeded in recalling him from his con- 
vent to a more nsefnl life. He was married, and became a 
village priest, and for ten years Nikon seems to have perform- 
ed with regularity his modest duties. But of all passions, 
that for a monastic seclusion, an asceticism founded upon the 
model of Paul or Anthony, seems to be the most powerful 
to the Russian mind ; the unhappy, the destructive, and the 
degrading taste for a monkish solitude or a hermit's cell, the 
mental disease of Thibet or of the Middle Ages, ruled, and 
still rules, in Russia with unabated power. Nor could Nikon 
ever restrain the promptings of his powerful but disordered 
intellect, and in every moment of disappointment or chagrin 
he pined for the soothing privations of a stone pillow or an 
eremite's cave. After ten years of labor as a village priest, he 
persuaded his wife to enter a convent, and went himself (he 
believed at the call of Heaven) into the wildest abodes of as- 
ceticism. At Solovetsky, amidst the fierce waves of the Arc- 
tic Sea, in the depth of unvarying winter for two-thirds of the 
year, the gigantic recluse complained of the luxury of his 
abode, pressed on into a sterner retreat ; and on a lonely island 
of the Onega, swept by wild winds, corroded by frost, torn by 
stinging insects, and fed or starved on the dole of pilgrims or 
the coarse food of a peasant, the Russian reformer macerated 
his powerful frame, poured forth his litanies, and lived for* 
many years, it is said, content^ 1 ) 

Alexis, the fair and amiable, sat on the Russian throne, and 
the annals of human friendships have few more curious rec- 
ords than that of the close and intense intimacy that grew up 
between the wild hermit of the "White Sea islands and the 
despot of the Russian realm. Nikon was drawn reluctantly, 
with pain and dim foreboding, upon some convent business, 
from his forest cell to Moscow. He met Alexis, and won a 
control over his gentle intellect that seems to have contrib- 
uted little to the happiness of either. The czar forced Nikon 
to leave his island to rule in his councils and guide the Rus- 
sian Church. He became bishop, patriarch. For six years 

(*) Mouravieff, p. 195. 



NIKOX. 493 

Nikon ruled Russia, nor was Alexis often absent from his 
side. In the magnificent robes of his ancient ritual, Nikon is 
seen on many a canvas or panel in his favorite churches, his 
huge form, his fierce countenance, indicating that powerful 
hand with which he purged the convents or assailed the Poles. 
Intellectually Nikon seems to have been scarcely less remark- 
able than in his physical nature. His mind, purified by ab- 
stinence and enlarged by silent thought, had, by some process 
little conceivable, become stored with learning in his forest 
home, and toiled upon literary labors that might have em- 
ployed the whole leisure of feebler intellects. His eloquence, 
his voice — the cry of a giant — subdued his impassioned audi- 
ences ; but it is as the reformer of the National Church that 
he is either adored or loathed by his countrymen. For six 
years he toiled to purify and elevate the rites, the liturgy, and 
the manners of his barbarous clergy.Q He was sincere, with 
a depth of truthfulness that Knox or Luther would have ad- 
mitted ; he was passionate, sensitive, imperious, tyrannical, and 
cruel almost as a Dominic or a Loyola. His janizaries roamed 
through Moscow, and when they had found an erring monk 
intoxicated, he was scourged and sent to prison. Nikon, it 
was said, never forgave. He exposed the metropolitan of 
Mira to be eaten alive by cannibals for smoking tobacco ; he 
left three deacons, who had married twice, to die in chains ;( 2 ) 
the prisons were filled with the clergy ; Siberia was peopled 
by the unworthy ministers of the Church; and, with no un- 
characteristic cruelty, in the land of Ivan the Terrible or Pe- 
ter the Great, Nikon enforced a Puritanic or a monkish aus- 
terity in every convent and every parish. 

To his vast, ill-ordered, yet fanciful intellect, so imperfectly 
fed with appropriate aliment, and eager for some advance in 
knowledge, there rose up the splendid pageant of that early 
church which had shone in fresh magnificence under Constan- 
tine, or adorned St. Sophia in the pious reign of Justinian ; 

(*) Mouravieff ; Stanley, p. 360 ; Macarius, ii., p. 227. 
( 2 ) They were released at the request of Macarius of Alexandria. Mac., 
ii., p. 364. 



494: THE GREEK CHURCH. 

and Nikon resolved, by a wide reform — an Oriental progress 
— to soften the barbarism of bis uncultivated clergy, and re- 
vive in Moscow and Novgorod the ancient graces of the East- 
ern rites. He sent to Mount Athos to gather from its pious 
fortresses, untouched by the infidel, the purest and most taste- 
ful of services, the true mode of giving the benediction with 
three fingers instead of two, the fairest altar-cloths, and the 
most authentic pictures. The most extravagant of modern 
ritualists would have been satisfied with the care bestowed 
by the barbarous patriarch upon robes and vestments, music 
and genuflections. His printing-press at Moscow poured 
forth his new ritual ; he corrected the Russian Scriptures, and 
improved the Sclavonic literature. His gigantic intellect, so 
keen in its perception of minute faults, was engaged in end- 
less labors. He generously fed the poor, founded hospitals 
and convents, and built a magnificent patriarchal palace on 
the Kremlin; was insensible to mortal dangers, and ruled 
Russia with awful severity. Alexis, with bare head, listened 
with fixed interest to the stern eloquence of his friend, stood 
uncovered before him at the cathedral, and gave him the prec- 
edence in spiritual rank ; and Nikon, with the zeal, if not the 
intelligence, of a Luther or a Calvin, conscious that he was 
pursuing a perilous career, pressed on the work of reform. 

Around him gathered the clouds of ruin: the nobles re- 
solved to destroy the fierce and impassive monk, who had 
risen from a peasant's hut to rule all Russia ; the priests re- 
fused to alter one word of that venerable service that had sat- 
isfied the tastes of their simple fathers. At last — most fatal 
omen for Nikon — a coldness grew up between him and his 
friend ; the fierce, impulsive, sensitive monk was wounded by 
the neglect of the czar, and, in the anguish of disappointment, 
of lost affection, and fading hope, once more recalled the first 
vision of his youth, the peaceful habitation of his manhood, 
and sighed for his hermit's cell.Q 

Fearful of approaching evil, wounded by the cruelty of 
Alexis, who refused to see him, for the last time clothed in 

C) Mouravieff; Stanley. 



NIKON'S FALL. 495 

the magnificent robes of the Greek service, the patriarch cele- 
brated the holy office in the cathedral of Moscow, and then, 
elate with indignation, tore off his costly insignia, laid down 
his patriarchal staff, and with his mighty voice, that echoed 
through the crowded bnilding, declared that he was no more 
the head of the Russian Church. Q Amidst the tears and the 
terror of the faithful people, who strove by various arts to 
confine him in the cathedral, to imprison him in their arms, 
Nikon left the splendid patriarchal palace and his royal cir- 
cle to hide in rage and gloom amidst the solitude of a forest. 
Not very far from the Holy City, in a pleasant wood, he had 
planned a monastery and a cathedral in imitation of that 
which enshrines the Holy Sepulchre ; and in its chancel rose 
five lofty seats, to enthrone the five eminent patriarchs, of 
whom he was at one moment the most powerful. But, in his 
disgrace, he took refuge in a tower behind the convent. His 
cell was so narrow as scarcely to admit his gigantic form. 
His bed was a ledge of stone. His dress, no longer glittering 
with the insignia of office, was coarse and rude ; he labored 
among the workmen, no unskillful mason, in completing his 
convent ; he wrote in his cell his . annals of Russia. ( 2 ) Yet 
humility was never a virtue of the savage anchorite ; he still 
heaped curses upon his enemies, and once he stole from his 
retreat to Moscow, hoping to revive the lost friendship of 
Alexis. He was repulsed. His enemies pursued him to his 
retreat ; and on a solemn day, in the patriarchal palace, assem- 
bled a remarkable synod of Eastern bishops to try and depose 
Nikon for contumacy and fancied crimes. Alexis, like Con- 
stantine at Nice, presided in the council, and wept incessantly 
over the sorrows of his former friend. Yet the feeble ruler 
did not venture to save him.( 3 ) He was condemned, degraded 
from his office, and in the dead of winter, when the fierce frost 
ruled over the Russian steppes, was hurried, thinly clad and 

C) 1658, the close of his six years' rule. Mouravieff, p. 263. 

( 2 ) Mouravieff, p. 223. Nikon, says the historian, was morbid, gloomy, 
quick to take an affront. 

( 3 ) Mouravieff, p. 227. His six years' rule was the most brilliant period 
of the reign of Alexis. 



496 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

torn with wild emotions, a prisoner to a lonely convent on 
the White Sea. Many years passed on ; Nikon was forgot- 
ten ; Alexis died ; his successor permitted the prisoner to be 
removed to the more genial clime of his favorite convent of 
the New Jerusalem ; and touched by a mortal illness, bowed 
down by old age and shame, the monk set out on his last jour- 
ney. His huge form was carried on a sledge to the Yolga; 
he floated on a barge down the rapid river ; the monks and 
the peasants thronged around him to kiss his hands or his 
garments; and as he approached the well-known shore he 
had only strength to receive the last rites of religion, to cross 
his hands upon his breast, and with one great sigh left the 
world in peace. 

Nikon renewed the Russian Church. He was no Luther, 
teaching progress ; nor a Wesley, breaking down the priestly 
caste ; nor a savage Dominic, founding an Inquisition : the 
vices or the virtues of Western reformers he never shared. 
But he brought into the national service the sweet music of 
Greece, the rich dress, the rare pictures of Mount Athos ; he 
improved the ritual ; he revived the memories of Constanti- 
nople and St. Sophia.Q He roused his barbarous countrymen 
to a fresh study of their own annals, brought to the minds of 
monks and priests the picture of the great patriarchates of 
the East, lost in poverty and humiliation, and pointed them to 
their brethren of the South. But. Nikon's reforms produced 
a great schism in the National Church. A large body of the 
people refused to accept his new books, looked with horror 
upon his innovations, and clung to the usages of their fathers. 
They are known as the Starovers, or Old Believers. They ab- 
hor the name and memory of Nikon( 2 ) the Reformer. He is 
the false prophet of the Apocalypse, and all his followers are 
Antichrist, and lost. No Starover will eat from the same dish 
with a Nikonian, or bathe in the same water. The Old Be- 
liever never smokes tobacco, will eat no potatoes — the devil's 



( x ) Mouravieff ; Stanley. 

( 2 ) Kohl. Dixon and the travelers give various notices of the Russian 
sects ; hut little unity seems to exist in the faith of the people. 



PETER THE GREAT. 49^ 

food — or worship the pictures of recent artists. He clings to 
the past with barbarous obstinacy, and many millions of these 
austere conservatives, frowned upon by rulers and scorned by 
priests, still inhabit the southern provinces, and even have 
their churches at Moscow. 

A regal Nikon, Peter the Great, is the next reformer of the 
Russian Church. He broke down the power of the great 
monasteries, deprived them of their revenues, reduced them to 
weakness ; he changed the constitution of the Church, and in 
the place of a single patriarch ruling at Moscow, placed the 
control of all ecclesiastical affairs in a Holy Synod. Q There 
is no longer a patriarch of Moscow. The Holy Synod or 
Council takes the place of the earlier prelate, and has been ad- 
mitted by Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Constantinople 
to an equality with the patriarchal office. The huge, stern, 
cruel Peter, hated by every Old Believer as the Antichrist 
and the Nikon of his age, crushed with rigorous hand the 
power of the clergy, and sanctioned the music, the robes, the 
improved books, the endless rites, suggested by the reforming 
monk. The modern Russian Church is the church of Nikon, 
and the wild hermit of the arctic forest has left the trace of 
his original hand upon the Christianity of the East. Yet the 
Greek Church still repeats the magnificence and the stately 
ceremonies of St. Sophia. There are no images ; but countless 
pictures of saints and deities crowd the walls of the Kremlin 
or of St. Isaac's ; and at Moscow the picture of the Iberian 
Mother visits its patients in state, like the Bambino at Rome.Q 
In every house, in every room, there is a picture with a candle 
burning before it, and no faithful churchman passes it without 
a bow. In the cathedral no organ or clashing band startles 
the pillared nave with wild bursts of labored harmony; but 

C 1 ) A laborious but wearisome effort, by the Rev. C. Tondini, to allure the 
Greek Church back to the arms of Roman infallibility, objects that the 
patriarchs have no temporal power ; but it is probable that they will pre- 
fer spiritual to temporal progress. See his Assault on the Patriarchates, 
p. 165 : a feeble argument. 

( 2 ) Lowth, Around the Kremlin, has a lively description of the deep de- 
votion shown by all classes to the Iberian Mother. 

32 



498 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

a choir of singers, trained to the highest excellence, breathe 
forth the ancient melodies of Greece ; or some Russian basso, 
it is said the most powerful of human voices, shouts forth the 
anathemas against the heretics, and terrifies his hearers with 
musical indignation. The traditions of a simpler ritual still 
linger, and sometimes a rude, ill-cultivated, but zealous layman 
reads, in faltering accents, from the clerical desk the story of 
the Passion, the scene in Gethsemane.Q 

The taste for a monkish life, which has received fatal 
wounds in Western Europe, still rules in modern Russia. 
The convents swarm in countless numbers from the Black 
Sea to the Arctic. It is a common conclusion for a mer- 
chant's or a banker's career to build a hermitage and lay the 
foundations of a monastery. The black clergy, as they are 
called — a host of hermits, friars, monks, ascetics — live in ab- 
stracted ignorance, and withdraw from society the faculties 
and the intellects that should be given to the common bene- 
fit ; and the principle of selfish isolation is illustrated in the 
Russian convent with a general prevalence unknown to mod- 
ern times. Paul and Anthony, the two Egyptian fanatics, are 
still the guides of millions, and Russia teems with anchorites 
and wild ascetics. Far out on the frozen waters of the White 
Sea, on a cluster of islands to whose clime Iona might seem a 
balmy haven of summer rest, stands Solovetsky, the most pros- 
perous, the chief, perhaps, of modern monasteries.( 2 ) In the 
dawn of the fifteenth century St. Savatie penetrated to the 
lonely scene, where even the hardy Lapps refused to dwell, 
carved a rude cross from a fallen pine, and made his hermit- 
age on the icy shores of Solovetsky. The island has become 
a city of meditative souls. A huge fortress encircles its chief 
convents. White churches, crowned by green cupolas and 
golden crosses, shino upon its hills. In the bright, short sum- 
mer, when tho clear Arctic Sea sweeps gently around the holy 

(*) Kohl, p. 166, hears a scarred soldier read in a church on Easter-eve 
with touching effect. 

( 2 ) Dixon's animated account of Solovetsky (see Free Russia) abounds 
in interesting particulars, of which I have been enabled to notice only a 
few. 



SOLOVETSKY. 499 

island, throngs of pilgrims wander to the shrine of St. Savatie, 
bathe in the sacred lake, and taste the consecrated bread. No 
woman is permitted to dwell on the hallowed soil. For the 
brief period of summer she may come, for a single day, under 
careful restraints, to win the benefits of the arctic pilgrimage ; 
but no sooner does the first snow whiten the poor herbage of 
the island than the privilege ceases. Then not even the Em- 
press of all the Russias would be suffered to intrude within 
the abode of celibacy. The monks of Solovetsky are indus- 
trious ; their workshops produce a variety of useful articles ; 
neatness, good order, and precise devotion mark the singular 
community ; its churches gleam with rich ornaments, and are 
stored with the gifts of the pious ; and, locked in the impene- 
trable security of a frozen sea, the followers of Anthony and 
Savatie dream out their dull and useless lives, defy the rigors 
of an arctic clime, and chant the litanies of Chrysostom or 
Basil. 

Such is an imperfect sketch of that imperishable Church 
that grew up on the rich shores of Syria, under the genial 
guidance of the Beloved Apostle, and has fixed its firm foun- 
dations in the heart of the most progressive of modern empires. 
It may be hoped that the genial influence of an enlightened 
reform may pass over its faithful but uncultivated followers ; 
that its superstitions may be softened, its lingering traits of 
harshness be removed ; that its humanity, which has been so 
lately proved in the liberation of millions of serfs, may lead 
it to a general toleration ; that its cumbrous ritual may be 
restored to the simplicity of a Scriptural age ; that Antioch 
and Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Moscow, may 
share the advancing tide of progress,( 2 ) and renew the moral 

( x ) Dixon, p. 79. The monks excel in bread-making, are tanners, weavers, 
etc. The convents resound with the hum of labor. They have proved 
that successful industry repels the influence of climate. 

( 2 ) The East will probably owe its new progress to the vigor of the ex- 
communicated Photius, yet the fury of the Popes against the founder of 
the Eastern Church is beyond expression. Hadrian II. assails him : " Pho- 
tio invasori, Photio sseculari et forensi, Photio neophyto et tyranno, Photio 
schismatico et damnato, Photio mceche et parricido." — Migne, Grcec. Pat, 



500 THE GREEK CHURCH. 

vigor, the clear common-sense, the love for man, the bound- 
less self-devotion, of the fishermen of Galilee. 

It would seem not unnatural that Asia should draw its hu- 
manity and its education from the Church of Ephesus and the 
East : on the Syrian shore, philosophy and religion may revive 
together ; and if the Eussian czars shall make knowledge the 
foundation of their new progress, they will at least carry some 
of the best fruits of Greek civilization to the banks of the 
Oxus and the Amoor. 

101, p. 11. Nor is there any one so execrated by the fanatics as the accom- 
plished scholar of the ninth century — the intellectual parent of the empire 
of the czars. 



INDEX. 



A. 

Ablabius, 165. 
Achilli, 404. 
Adrian IV., 419. 

his bull, 438. 
Agelius, 165. 
Agnes of Meran, 43. 
Agrippa II., 319. 
Albi, 364. 

Albigenses, 363, 364. 
Alexander III., his bull, 439. 
Alexis, Czar, 493. 
Alpine Church, 165. 
Angrogna, Valley of, 212, 238. 
Anna Yan der Hove, 132. 
Anne, sister of the Emperor Basil, 4*79. 
Antichrist, 211. 
Antonia, Castle of, 30*7. 
Aragon, 401. 
Arian controversy, 19. 
Ariosto, 72. 
Arius, 151, 152, 458. 
Armagh, Cathedral of, 452. 

University, 453. 
Arnaud, Henry, 199, 235. 
Athanasius, 152, 458, 460. 
Athens, Church of, 336. 
Athesis, 188. 
Auto-da-fe, 382. 



B. 



Babylon, 118. 
Balloon, the first, 395. 



Balsille, the, 233. 

Balthazar Gerard, 130. 

Barbes, the, 201, 211. 

Bards, Irish, 424. 

Barnabas, 330. 

Basil the Great, 159. 

Basle, Council of, 183. 

Bastile, 367. 

Bells consecrated, 441. 

Bible, 255, 256. 

Bishops of Kome, 9, 15, 23. 

Bishops, pride of, 21. 

Bobadilla, 109. 

Bohemia, 178. 

Borgias, the, 52, 54. 

Boris Godunoff, 485, 486, 488. 

Bossuet, 283, 285. 

Bostaquet, Dumont de, 287, 289. 

Brehon laws, 441. 

C. 

Cjssakea, 339. 
Calas, Jean, 294. 
Calvin, 210, 260. 
Campion, 128. 
Caraffa, 113. 

Cardinal Inquisitors, 113. 
Cashel, Council of, 435. 
Castelfranco, Lord of, 286. 
Castelluzo, cave of, 225. 
Catacombs, the, 14, 16. 
Cathari, the, 155, 165, 173. 
Catherine de' Medici, 262. 



502 



INDEX, 



Catherine de' Medici, her character, 263. 

policy, 270. 
Catinat, 236. 
Caumont, Baron de, 291. 
Celts emigrate, 451. 
Cervantes, 101. 
Chalcedon, 116. 
Charlemagne, 32, 173. 
Charles Albert, 242. 
Charles Emanuel, 214. 
Charles V., 91, 189. 
Charles IX., 270. 
Chatelet, dungeons of, 261. 
Children, Crusade of, 174. 
Christians, dispersed, 323. 

flight of, 354. 

new, in Spain, 369. 
Church of Jerusalem, 300, 318. 
Clement VII., 253. 
Coligny, 271. 
College of France, 249. 
Colporteurs, 258. 
Columba,415,416,454. 
Cong, Monastery of, 441. 
Conquest of Ireland, 409. 
Conscience, liberty of, 240. 
Constance, Council of, 175. 

its proceedings and decrees, 177. 
Constantine the Great, 17. 

establishes Christianity, 145. 

at Nice, 148. 

his faults, 149. 

remorse, 149. 

opens the synod, 152. 

an Arian, 153. 

persecutes Athanasius, 154. 
Constantinople, 458. 

its treasures, 459. 

an Arian city, 460. 

saves Europe, 468. 

falls, 480. 

creed of, 160. 
Convents, 172. 
Cordova, 402. 
Council, Apostolic, 331. 
Council of Trent, 189. 

its influence, 187. 



Council of Trent meets, 188. 

dissolves, 193. 
Council, the second, 155. 
Councils, the third and fourth, 162. 

the fifth, 168. 

the sixth, 169. 
Crispus, 149. 
Cromwell defends the Vaudois, 223. 

cruelty in Ireland, 450. 
Crusade against the Albigenses, 49. 
Cyril of Alexandria, 162. 

assails Nestorius, 163. 

in danger, 166. 
Cyril of Jerusalem, 159. 



DAlbret, Jeanne, 267, 271. 

Damasus, Pope, 20, 161. 

Dark Ages, 170. 

D'Azeglio, 242. 

De Broglie, 155. 

De Laval, Charlotte, 269. 

De Lunz, Philippa, 261. 

De Parat, 236. 

De Pareilles, 235. 

Del Monte, 188. 

Demetrius, the false, 487. 

Descartes, 292. 

"Desert, Church in the," in France, 

293. 
Deza, second Inquisitor, 374. 

his victims, 374. 
Diana de Poitiers, 262. 
Diet of Worms, 91. 
Diocletian, 17. 
Dioscorus, 167. 
Dolet, 258. 
Dominic, 50. 

his miracles, 358. 

Inquisition, 359. 

severity, 361. 

and the Inquisition, 358. 
Don Carlo di Sesso, 386. 
Donald, King of Ulster, 444. 
Dragonnades, 286, 
Du Ferier, 190, 



INDEX. 



503 



Dublin besieged, 429, 431. 
Dungeons of Inquisition, 378. 



E. 
Eck, 88. 
Eisenach, 93. 
Elizabeth, Queen, 447. 
England, danger of, 39*7. 
Ephesus, 166. 

its appearance, 332. . 
Eugenius IV., 184. 
Europe, in first century, 300. 
Eusebius of Caesarea, 148. 
Eutyches, 166. 
Eymeric, code of, 376. 



Famine in Judea, 230. 

Farel, 250. 

Felix, 339. 

Festus, 339. 

Feudalism, 169. 

Fitz-Stephen, 423. 

Flechier, 285. 

France under interdict, 44. 

Francis of Assisi, 50. 

Francis I., his character, 247. 

dies, 263. 
Francis II., 266. 



G. 
Galilee, 315. 

ravaged, 347. 
Galileo, his youth, 390. 

discoveries, 391. 

condemned, 393. 

dialogues, 393. 

sentenced, 394. 

death, 394. 
Galley-slaves, 290. 
Gallican Church, its fall, 298. 
Garnet, his trial, 134. 
Gastaldo, order of, 220. 
Geneva, 228. 



Geneva, its generosity, 287. 
Geraldines in Ireland, 432. 
Germans invade France, 407. 
Germany, in 1517, 83. 
Gerson at Constance, 180. 
Ghent, 284. 

Gilly, Dr., visits the Vaudois, 241. 
Giovanni de' Medici (Leo X.), 62. 
" Glorious Return, The," 229, 230. 
Goa, Inquisition at, 103. 
Greek Church, the, 455. 

separates from the Latin, 469. 

its advance, 499, 500. 
Gregory the Great, 24. 

his ritual, 27. 

spreads monasticism, 171. 
Gregory II., 31. 
Gregory Xazianzen, 156. 

his sermons, 157. 

enemies, 157. 

made bishop, 159. 

severity, 159. 
Gregory l£, 366. 
Gresham, Sir Thomas, 257. 
Guinevert, 233. 
Guises, the, 266. 
Gunpowder Plot, 129, 136. 

H. 

Hegesippus, 356. 

Henry II. of England, 410. 

his character, 433. 

at Dublin, 434. 

lavish generosity, 436. 

his death, 438. 
Henry III. of France, 129. 
Henry IV., emperor, 38. 
Henry IV. of France, 399. 

marries Margaret, 270. 
Heresies, strange, 150. 
Hildebrand, 33, 41, 171. 
Holy City, the, 305. . 
Holy Houses, 377. 
Holy Office, 408. 
Holy Synod, Russian, 497. 
Holy Trinity, Monastery of the, 484. 



504 



INDEX. 



Honorius, 169. 

his heresy, 169. 
Hosius of Cordova, 152. 
Huber, 291. 
Huguenots, the, 247. 

first appear, 248. 

their honesty, 252. 

persecuted, 253. 

rise in revolt, 269. 

flight, 286. 

still in peril, 299. 
Huss, John, his fame, 178. 

at Constance, 180. 

imprisoned, 181. 

his trial, 182. 

is burned, 183. 
Hypatia, her death, 163. 

I. 

Image-worship, 29, 191. 

Indulgences, 79. 

Ingeburga, 43. 

Innocent III, 41, 47, 51. 

Innocent VIII., 205. 

Inquisition, Dominic and the, 359. 

Inquisition, Roman, 388, 403. 

its prisons, 404. 

in 1850, 406. 
Inquisition, Spanish, 370. 

its rules, etc., 376. 

its dungeons, 379. 
Iona, its missionaries, 415. 

ravaged by the Danes, 417. 

described, 454. 
Ireland, Conquest of, 409. 

described, 411. 

its people, 412. 

bards, 412. 

St. Patrick, 413. 

schools, 414. 
Irish Church, its origin, 418. 

hated by Rome, 418. 

destroyed, 420. 
Irish revolt, 445. 

defy the Pope, 446. 

devoted to Rome now, 450. 



Irish indiscretion, 451. 
Isabella Rosello, 106. 
Italy, Reformers of, 387. 
Ivan the Terrible, 481. 



James, brother of the Lord, 245, 304. 

James II., 451. 

Janavel, Joshua, 228. 

Jerome burned at Constance, 178, 183. 

Jerome, St., 21, 171. 

Jerusalem, Church of, 300. 

Jerusalem, City of, 302. 

its madness, 337. 

sufferings, 348. 

destroyed, 353, 354. 

its lasting influence, 356. 
Jesuits, Loyola and the, 99. 
Jesuits, their missions, 126. 

literature, 127. 

decay, 139. 

Pombal, 139. 

order abolished, 141. 

revived, 142. 

persecute the Yaudois, 215. 

persecute the Huguenots, 290. 

excite the Irish to rebel, 448. 

intrigues in Russia, 487. 
Jews despised by the Romans, 303. 

their zeal, 316. 

fate of, 353. 
Jews in Spain, 368. 

persecuted, 370. 

banished, 371. 

flight, 373. 
Job, Russian patriarch, 484. 
John, King of England, 45. 

opposes the Pope, 46. 

submits, 46. 

conduct in Ireland, 442. 
John, St., his humility, 314. 
John XXIII., Pope, deposed, 176. 
Josephus, commander, 347. 

a traitor, 347. 
Jovius, historian, 71. 
Julius II. dies, 56. 



INDEX. 



505 



Julius in., 188. 
Justinian, 168. 

builds St. Sophia, 462. 

his ardor. 463. 

dedicates St. Sophia, 465, 



K 



Kedron, 307. 

Kremlin, the, 483. 



Laborie, 210. 
Lainez, 109, 190. 
Languedoc, 362. 
Lefevre, Peter, 119. 
Leger, historian, 198. 
Leo and Luther, 56. 
Leo the Great, 167. 
Leo X., 61. 

his reign, 69. 

luxury, 73. 

extravagance, 77. 

purgatory, 78. 

Golden Age, 90. 

death, 98. 
Le Tellier, 282. 
Liberius, Pope, an Arian, 154. 
Lorenzo de' Medici, 66. 
Lorenzo, Leo's nephew, 73. 
Lollard, 202. 
Lorraine, Cardinal of, 190. 

his cruelty, 266. 
Louis XTV. a persecutor, 285. 
Louis Philippe persecutes, 298. 
Louvre, the, 248. 
Loyola, Ignatius, 99. 

his reading, 102. 

a beggar, 103. 

at Paris, 107. 

his ignorance, 108. 

his faith, 117. 

death, 143. 
Lucerna, vale of, 198. 

set free, 239. 
Luther a peasant's son, 63. 



Luther awakened, 85. 

in danger, 85. 

at Leipsic, 89. 

his hymn, 93. 

at Worms, 99. 

quick sale of his works, 257. 
Lyons, " Good men " of, 48. 



M. 

Macmorrough, Dermot, 409. 

in Ireland, 421. 

treachery, 422. 

cruelty, 423. 
Magicians, 396. 
Maintenon, Madame de, 282. 
Manreza, Cave of, 103. 
Marguerite of France, 249. 
Mariana defends regicide, 127. 
Marina marries Demetrius, 489. 
Marolles a galley-slave, 291. 
Marot, Clement, 248. 
Marseilles, 362. 
Martyrdom, age of, 13. 
Mary, Bloody, 189. 

her cruelty, 195. 
Mary Queen of Scots, 193. 
Mary, Virgin, her home, 324. 
Massillon, 283. 
Matilda, Countess, 37. 
Meaux, 250, 265. 
Mecca, 467. 

Medici, Cardinal de', 61. 
Medici, the, 62. 
Melanchthon, 88. 
Melitius, 159. 
Michael Angelo, 72. 
Milton, 194, 223. 
Modena, 389. 

Moderator of the Yaudois, 245. 
Mohammed a reformer, 467. 
Monastic system, 170. 
Monophysites, the, 168. 
Monothelites, the, 169. 
Moors, the, driven from Spain, 37( 
Moriah, Mount, 307. 
Moscow, 474. 



506 



INDEX. 



Moscow, its patriarch, 4*76. 

burned, 490. 
Mount Athos, 475. 

liberality of the monks, 487. 



Napoleon I., 241. 

Nazanzen, Gregory. See Gregory Nazian- 

zen. 
Nectarius, 147. 
Nero, 12. 
Nestorians,,166. 
Nicaea, Council at, 144. 
Nicene Creed, 167. 
Nikon, 491. 

his character, 492. 

reforms, 494. 

severity, 495. 

death, 496. 

influence, 496. 
Nimes, massacre at, 297. 
Normans sack Rome, 40. 

in Ireland, 423. 
Novatians, 165. 
Novgorod, 474. 
Nuremberg, 84. 



Obedience (in Jesuitism), its results, 

105. 
O'Briens, the, 445. 
O'Connor, Roderic, 430. 

his conduct, 441. 

death, 441. 
Olga, Princess, 478. 
Olives, Mount of, 307. 
Orange, William I. of, 190. 
O'Toole, Laurence, 427. 



Paganism at Rome, 20. 
Pale, the English, 436. 
Palissy, the potter, 249, 251, 254. 
Paphnutius, 147. 



Parsons, 128. 
Pascal, his power, 137. 
Paschal, 208. 
Passover, the last, 349. 
Patriarchates, fall of, 473. 
Patriarchs, the five, 472. 
Paul III., 110. 

undecided, 111. 
Paul IV., 269. 
Paul, St., education, 327. 

at Antioch, 330. 

at Ephesus, 332. 

at Athens, 337. 

in the temple, 337. 

voyage to Rome, 339. 

at Rome, 341. 
Pella, Church at, 355. 
Pepin, 31. 

Perouse, Vale of, 198. 
Peter, St., in prison, 322. 

character, 313. 

was he at Rome ? 343. 
Pilate, letter of, 319. 
Pius IV., 190. 

Pius IX. revives the Inquisition, 405. 
Philip Augustus, 43. 
Philip II., 398. 
Philip IV., 385. 
Photius, his learning, 471. 
Politian, 66. 
Popes, power of, 10. 

corrupt, 17. 

election of, 57, 60. 

three rival, 175. 

persecutors, 203. 
Port Royal, 136. 
Pra del Tor, Castle of, 213, 240. 
Pre aux Clercs, 262. 
Printers and Popes, 251. 
Printing forbidden, 255. 
Prudentius, 13. 



R. 

Rabelais, 255. 
Raboteau, the Misses, 287. 
Raffaello, 71. 



INDEX. 



507 



Reformation, 184, 207, 357. See Luther. 

in Spain, 381. 
Reformers, humane, 116. 
Richelieu, 282. 
Rodoret, 234. 
Roman cities, 301. 
Roman empire, 22, 301. 
Romanoff, house of, 491. 
Romans besiege Jerusalem, 390. 
Rome, pagan, 10. 

corruptions of, 11. 

conquered, 162. 

Bible at, 185. 

captured, 408. 
Rousseau, 292. 
Rurik, 474. 
Russia, its origin, 474. 

S. 

Saint Louis, 367. 

Saintes, town of, 251. 

Salbertrans, Battle of, 231. 

Salmeron, 190. 

San Martino, vale of, 198, 204. 

Santa Maria, Church of, 388. 

Saracens, 169,466. 

Savonarola, 67, 379. 

Savoy, Duke of, 219. 

Saxony, Elector of, 81. 

Seven Churches, the, 457. 

Seville, 402. 

Sicarii at Jerusalem, 316. 

Sigismund, Emperor, 176, 182. 

Sigismund of Poland, cruelty to Russia, 

487. 
Silverius, Pope, 23. 
Simon, 349. 
Simeon, 354. 

Solovetsky, Monastery of, 498. 
Sorbonne condemns printing, 258. 
Sorcerers, 396. 
Spain, decay of, 401. 
Spaniards, 368. 

" Spiritual Exercises," the, 103. 
St. Sophia, Church of, 464. 
Starovers, or Old Believers, 476. 



Stephen, first martyr, 322. 
Stephens, Robert, printer, 258. 
Strongbow, 426. 
Sturm, 92. 

T. 

Taka, Council at, 424. 
Temporal power, 32. 
Tetzel, 79. 
Theodore, Czar, 485. 
Theodosius II., 164. 
Theodosius the Great, 158. 
Tiraboschi, 395. 

Titus, his true character, 348, 353. 
Toledo, Cardinal, 114. 
Torquemada, 370. 
Toulouse, Inquisition at, 364. 
Trent, Council of, 116. 

opens, 188. 

decrees, 191. 

labors, 192. 

close, 194. 
Trinity, Count of, 211. 
Turin persecutes the Vaudois, 218. 

pities and honors the Vaudois, 240. 

celebration at, 245. 



Ulster, massacre of, 449. 
Urban II., 173. 



V. 

Vassy, 268. 
Vaudois, the, 198. 

purity of, 205. 

exiles, 220. 

martyrs, 221. 

expulsion, 226. 

return, 227. 

set free (1848), 242. 

valleys illuminated, 242. 
Venice, 109. 
Vespasian, 348. 
Victor Amadeus II, 200. 



508 



INDEX. 



Victor Amadeus II., anecdote of, 200. 
Victor Amadeus IV., 239. 
Vigilius, Pope, 23, 168. 
Vladimir, 4*79. 
Voltaire, 296. 

W. 

Warrior caste, 185, 199. 
Waterford, 427. 
William I. of Orange, 130. 



William I. of Orange at home, 131. 

death, 131. 
Wittenberg, 82. 
Worms, 93. 



Xayier, Francis, 124. 

his success, 125. 

death, 125. 
Ximenes, 375. 



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